Haxby in the Afternoon
by sierrac
Summary: After several sleepless nights, Mary returns to Haxby one last time to find Richard and clear the air. They explore the empty mansion, revisiting the rights and wrongs of the past while speculating about a future that never was… and perhaps discovering a new way forward.
1. Honor

**AN: I've never written a fanfic before, but after re-watching the Christmas special, this just had to come out. The Crawleys behaved abominably toward Richard at the end, and Mary had to have seen it – I thought he needed a proper defense. This takes place post-Christmas special. But Matthew has not proposed yet, although he has forgiven Mary for the Mr. Pamuk incident. **

**Special thanks to all the wonderful authors like Ju-dou and MrsTater, who write Mary/Richard stories that are such fun and inspiration!**

**Warning: The first chapter is a bit talky, but I promise secret passages and guest appearances to come…**

* * *

**1. Honor**

Mary could hear her brisk footsteps echo in the crunch of gravel under her feet as she approached Haxby from the south path. It was quite a walk from Downton and she was growing tired, but she did not want anyone to know her whereabouts this particular afternoon, so she walked despite the cold and the length of the journey.

Haxby loomed above her as she followed the path to the front drive, its grey stone facade fading into the clouds of a gloomy Yorkshire day. In the distance a crow called; the sound bounced off the stone as did her footfalls, and that too seemed appropriate to the mansion's harmony with its surroundings. If only she felt a part of it.

Despite roaming its halls as a child, despite very nearly becoming its new owner, Haxby was a mystery to her, Mary mused as she trod round the blue coupe parked carelessly near the steps on her way to the front door. This sprawling, eclectic manor was especially unknowable, no matter how many visits she had spent here. It was something in the amalgamation of different styles – a bit of French chateau, a piece of English gothic, a smattering of Moorish castle, all thrown together at the whim of its eccentric creator. Who could hope to possess such a singular vision without being swallowed up by it completely?

Even the doors were particular to the previous owner, Mary realized as she tried the knob – carved into the wood was the Russell's family crest. No, this was not a place she could make her home. But she pushed the thought aside as she pushed open the unlocked door, the sound of her footsteps now magnified a hundred-fold by the colossal marble entry. On previous visits, the emptiness and the echoes had startled her. She remembered Haxby as full of life, not an empty monument to a fallen family. But today, she was glad of the desolation of the place; it rather suited her intentions this afternoon.

"Now this is an unexpected pleasure," a voice boomed across the vast hall. Mary's eyes darted from corner to corner, looking for its source; for a minute she could find nothing in the enveloping white. Finally her gaze landed on the great staircase, where Richard sat perched on the landing next to what appeared to be a bottle of whiskey.

"Surveying your kingdom?" she asked as she approached the staircase, her eyes sweeping past Richard and following the gracious curve of the banister up to the loggia where they had stood together and surveyed the house themselves, not so long ago.

"I have decided to call it an investment," he replied. "Amazing how the business world has a way of clearing out all the trite little personal allusions that come with the idea of a home, or a kingdom, as you put it. Now, this is just a building that I am going to sell."

"I doubt the Russells saw it like that."

"Neither did I, until last week. Neither will the new owners, in all probability. But what they call it is entirely up to them."

"Have you found a buyer so soon?" Mary asked as she draped her fur coat over the railing and ascended the first stair, feeling rather like a child at the zoo approaching the lion's cage. She knew the animal was contained, but those bars looked terribly unstable...

"I had a meeting with my broker this morning. But there is still work to be finished. I doubt it will be ready for the market until summer." Richard tilted his head to look up at Mary as she approached, quirking an eyebrow when she settled herself on the landing beside him. "Unless perhaps the Crawleys are in need of an annex?"

"Will you give us as good a deal as you managed when you bought it?"

"Oh I'll replicate which end of the bargain I got," he replied slowly, watching her from the corner of his eye.

Mary winced slightly at the bitterness in his tone. She knew this conversation was not going to be pleasant, though she was nevertheless relieved when she found he was here. Now she was less sure.

"What are you doing here, Mary?" asked Richard with a sigh in his voice. "You never condescended to visit Haxby on your own before."

"I was looking for you."

He made a 'ta-da!' gesture to indicate he had been found, the sarcasm dripping from the movement less than appreciated by Mary as she tried to find what she wanted to say next.

"The truth is that I've not quite been able to sleep since our... confrontation," she said, rubbing her eyes as if to emphasize the point. "I keep turning the evening over again and again in my mind, yet..." she trails off, watching as Richard took a long drink from the glass she hadn't noticed he was holding. There were many things about him she hadn't noticed, she realized.

Fortified by the liquor, his gaze fell back on her impatiently.

"I can't seem to settle on what exactly is bothering me," she said, and then paused. "Is that whiskey?"

"Scotch," he replied, taking the bottle and topping up his crystal tumbler so gratuitously that it was nearly full. "I wasn't expecting company, so I only have one glass." He handed her the bottle, which she raised to her lips with a shrug for a bit of dutch courage.

"Some housewarming," she ventured, "two people and this enormous house and not enough glasses to go around." One corner of her mouth quirked up in a half smile, but Richard just looked at her.

So she resumed, staring straight ahead: "It was a terrible way to end things."

He nodded. "Yes, it was."

They both seemed to consider this for a moment. Then Mary turned to him, screwing up her courage to ask the most important question that had been on her mind over the week's sleepless nights. "Were you telling the truth?"

"The truth?" he echoed, exaggerating the word with wide eyes and a slight shake of his head; she felt like he was mocking the gravity with which she had delivered the question.

"When you said Lavinia knew that Matthew didn't love her, that she said we would all be happier if he would just admit it. Was that true?"

"Yes it was," Richard confirmed, and for a moment he looked so sincere that Mary could not help but believe him. Then his eyes darkened, and he spoke in that careful, indulgent way that sent shivers down her spine because she speaks that way too, when she has thoughts of revenge or anger. "I learned a long time ago that lies are useless weapons. It's reality that truly wounds."

It was better confirmation than his sincere reply. This was Richard's kind of honesty, and she wondered how fully honest he was to people other than her about his real motivations.

"So you told the truth." Mary was trying to wrap her mind around it. "A difficult truth, yes, but the truth nevertheless. And Matthew punched you in the face for it."

At this, Richard actually laughed. "Must we revisit that particular indignity? Being sucker-punched by the Crawley Kid was far from my finest hour. Though who knew the solicitor from Manchester had it in him?" he asked the ceiling. "If you truly want to parade our recent history, there were so many other choice moments throughout the holiday we can drudge up. Perhaps you'd like to reenact the charades game too, if we're to thoroughly investigate the circumstances."

"I mention it for a reason," Mary said, a bit put out by the wall of sarcasm she must confront. "Or would you not care to hear my defense of you?"

"I don't need your noble defense, my Lady; your justifications mean very little to me either way."

"Then I'm sorry you feel that way," she said brusquely, noting that the inflection in her voice took on a slightly sharper edge at the mention of her class. Though their exchange was going much as she anticipated, she was nevertheless dismayed that this, like their every conversation of late, must degenerate into an argument.

He was correct, she had come here with noble defense in mind. Or at least some idea of righting the wrongs of that unpleasant evening. In truth, what occurred that night made her feel ill; not just her behavior, or even Richard and Matthew's. In actuality, she was quite ashamed of her entire family, and this was the first time she had encountered such a feeling.

* * *

It had been Granny, of all people, to trigger it. Mary had watched, speechless after all that had occurred, as Richard smoothed his hair and addressed the dowager countess, explaining that she would not see him at Downton any longer. Granny's reply, "Do you promise?" was the soul of brevity and wit, but it nevertheless sounded a sour note to Mary's ear. In fact, she thought it repellant.

More than used to her grandmother's barbed remarks, she still found this one particularly graceless, and Richard's words from earlier echoed in her mind: "What more could I have done?" It was a question she couldn't answer – then, or as the evening wore on and the family reconvened in the drawing room.

Papa, on the other hand, was the epitome of grace and manners and a heavy dose of sanctimony. He was delighted with Matthew, grasping him by the shoulder as he congratulated him on a good show. "I am proud of you, old chap. You came to the defense of Lavinia's good name, and frankly our entire family's honor."

From the background Mary looked on, astonished. So her little scandal now cast aspersions across the whole family. And some inconsequential fistfight seemed to remedy the situation, as far as honor was concerned. But what good was that performance to her? Richard was probably still going to publish the story; if anything, the fight with Matthew provoked him further.

"I'm just thrilled that awful man is out of our lives," Mama said, "even if it took a boxing match in the library to get rid of him."

Matthew nodded regretfully, "I wish it hadn't come to blows."

"Though that is as final a rejection as one can issue," added Granny. "And Mary is now free of the _newspaper man_ once and for all."

"Honestly, Mary, I don't know what you saw in him in the first place," her mother addressed her with a shake of her head and her wide-eyed expression of perplexity.

They were carrying on as if the display from earlier was a play they had seen on an enjoyable night out – no one seemed to recognize that Mary had just lost a man who had been her fiancé for two years. Two years was a lot of history to share with someone – countless luncheons and walks in the garden, cocktails and dancing, shared dreams and future plans. Yes, it was Mary's decision to break it off; she believed it necessary and right, and she didn't regret it. But she was in no mood to celebrate, either.

"We all make mistakes, Cora dear," replied Granny. "I remember a handsome young soldier who caught my eye when I was about Mary's age. He seemed quite intriguing in uniform, until he opened his mouth and I realized immediately he was not our kind of people. It just took Mary a little longer to realize it."

"That is an important lesson," Robert mused. "One I fear Sybil will likely learn as well."

This comparison was almost more than Mary could stand. It wasn't as if she was about to run off with the chauffeur – she had planned to marry one of the Empire's wealthiest and most influential men!

She knew her family had been against it from the start, and that no one could appreciate the advantages, even the charm, she found in Richard. But their outdated creed of lofty ideals was nothing but hypocrisy, she was beginning to realize, a defense mechanism where honor was code for self-righteousness and "our kind of people" was a group Mary was uncertain she wished to belong to.

Her father had told her earlier that he wanted an honorable man for her, the implication against Richard quite clear. So, he preferred a suitor who went around punching people, despite being very clearly in the wrong, as opposed to a fiancé that went to considerable lengths to protect the family from one of many scandals that seemed to congregate around Downton. When she thought about it, the Bates affair was no less damning than her own indiscretion, though Mary didn't hear Papa talk about the compromised honor of the family in _that_ situation.

Richard was not 'their kind of people', yet the Crawleys were perfectly content to use him for whatever advantage he could provide. All the while, they disparaged him at every opportunity, and, when he dared object, they closed ranks and feigned amnesia of his contribution. His methods were questionable – Mary knew that first-hand – but if the Crawleys were to navigate the tough world they now inhabited, they could no longer hope to remain above the fray while the common people did their dirty work. At least Mary was honest enough to admit the messy conditions they all lived in, and get a bit muddy herself.

In the face of all that commotion that evening, she believed it had been Richard, ironically, who emerged with the most dignity intact. He was not honorable. But he had succeeded in proving that neither were they. She felt rotten; for using him, for throwing him over, for not appreciating what he had offered. She felt embarrassed; for Matthew who couldn't control his guilt and Granny who couldn't control her tongue, lashing out at her heartbroken former fiancé. She felt repulsed; for Papa and the rest retreating behind a veil of false civility that served only to confirm their own sense of superiority.

She went to bed that night thinking about all of this, and so began her sleepless nights. Richard was hardly blameless, obviously. Yet she was beginning to understand why he so despised her class of people, and her family's appalling conduct that night was what shocked her out of her complacency. They moved in the world guarded by concepts of honor and virtue, and she had never questioned it. But what a dangerous idea honor was, in the wrong hands.

* * *

Richard knew nothing of the family's conversation after he had stormed upstairs to pack, though Mary suspected he had an idea. The evening continued much in the manner it had begun, until Mary could no longer tolerate one more smug, self-congratulatory word. If her family only realized, she contemplated with a small degree satisfaction, that their remarks would lead her here four days later, back to the side of her dishonorable blackmailer.


	2. History

**2. History**

"If that's why you're here, to stand up for truth and honor despite our falling out, then I can assure you, you are wasting my time and yours," said Richard, his eyes fixated on her stockinged legs stretched out down the stairs in front of them. Mary noticed she had been tapping her feet together incessantly out of anxiety; suddenly self-conscious, she curled her legs under her and looked away. She saw Richard take another sip of scotch out of the corner of her eye, and abruptly she wondered why_ he _was here, of all places, drinking alone in his empty ruin.

"How naive of me," she replied. "I thought you might actually be gratified to hear me admit you were right."

"Sorry to disappoint you, Mary," he said as he rested his glass on the marble stair, "but your opinions stopped carrying significance for me approximately four days ago."

At this, she could not help feeling indignant. "I'm shocked. Did my opinions ever matter to you? Clearly they didn't when you blackmailed me into an engagement."

"How did we go from you attempting to tell me I was right about something to you accusing me of criminal activity?" Richard wondered. Mary thought it irritating that he was more amused than insulted; she did not find the situation so amusing at the time. "And you agreed to marry me, remember?"

"After you learned of my scandal and held it over my head from there on out."

"That may be what you tell yourself," observed Richard with disquieting insight, "but we had an arrangement long before your little affair came to light. It just took Mr. Pamuk to make you announce it publicly."

Mary should not be shocked that he remembered her Turkish ambassador's name; nevertheless, she found his recall intriguing. Some time had passed since they last discussed the incident, though clearly it had remained in the forefront of his mind.

"_You_ announced it!" she replied. "I read it in the newspaper the next morning along with Papa and the entire country, and I was just as surprised as they were."

"Then on whom does that reflect more poorly? On me, for coming to your aid and then taking my reward by announcing what should have been common knowledge long before; or on you, for being so reluctant to go public that it took a scandal to force your hand?"

"You've always felt it was fine to keep me waiting," he continued; she watched his hand clench at this evidently long-held grievance, "until of course you needed my help. Do you barter in engagements now? Because at this point, that is a worthless currency."

If Mary had hoped to wrangle an apology out of him, she realized she would be disappointed. He clearly felt no remorse for his actions. Richard had always approached their relationship like a business transaction, so it should come as no surprise that the ethics he applied to their association were no different than those he employed in his profession. She would have to make do with his concession that they were both compromised by self-interest.

And if he acknowledged that much, she probably should as well. The revelations of the previous week had served one purpose: she gained a greater understanding of how Richard operated, and how he had expected them to operate together. She had not ever fully grasped where he was coming from before. And while it wasn't justification for some of the things he did, knowing what she now knew made her feel more empowered than she had in a long time. In this instance, he had seen her selfishness clearly, and countered it with his own. Perhaps it was not healthy dynamic, necessarily, but for two people such as them it was likely the only one that could work. And now that she knew the rules, she was beginning to think she might be able work within them.

"Your currency is fairly worthless too," Mary countered. "Blackmail is like a gun with one bullet, and you've used yours." Richard was prepared to expose her secret, and she defied him in spite of the consequences. All the people that mattered in her life now knew the scandal. Even if he were to publish it for all of England tomorrow, that particular hold he had over her was gone.

"I haven't yet," he said, his eyes never leaving hers. Could it be that his every remark was _actually _tinged with a threat, or was that just the way Mary heard him?

"Go ahead. Shoot me," she replied with a sweet smile, all the while challenging his stare with a determined one of her own.

"Be glad I don't have a real gun."

"I think Matthew's the one who is glad about that," she joked. "You'd lure him here and bury the body in the secret passage; no one would find him for years."

If she was trying to goad him, her attempt was unsuccessful. Richard simply laughed as he broke their gaze to look around the great hall.

"That is what Haxby is missing..." he mused, steering the conversation away from his adversary. Perhaps Mary had gotten to him after all.

"No house of ours could be so benign as this," he continued, indicating the cherubs residing amongst the flowers and trelliswork of the frieze that adorned arches. "No, I don't think being surrounded by angels and flowers would have suited us. We would have needed underground passages and hidden rooms; plenty of spaces for intrigue."

"Well I only know about the one. But I suppose anyone inclined towards secrets might have a few more compartments hidden about."

"The one?"

"…the secret passage?" Mary wondered just how much he had had to drink; if he had even been listening to her.

He cocked his head to the side, asking slowly, "What secret passage?"

"The one in the reading room?" At Richard's uncomprehending expression: "I thought you knew."

"Here. At Haxby."

She was as puzzled as he was. "Of course. Haven't your architects poured over the building plans? Excavated every inch of this place?"

"No one has found anything to indicate a secret passage..." Richard looked at her like she had lost her mind.

Mary rolled her eyes. "I'll prove it to you." Standing up, she gestured for him to follow her. He went reluctantly after her, down the stairs and along the hallway, one of the house's main arteries that emanated from the central hall.

They walked past the neo-classical music salon, with its ceiling painting of Greek muses playing harps; past the azure-colored billiard room, where celestial wallpaper traced gilded astronomical patterns across every surface; past the smoking lounge, still draped in red velvet fringed with green tassels. Entering the dark-paneled library, the space struck Mary as a kind of limbo. Stripped of their function, the bare shelves seemed to be in a state of perpetual waiting, and she could not decide if this was a house in a state of becoming, or of fading away.

"You needn't look quite so pleased with yourself," Richard said as she led him across the inlayed floor, their footsteps disturbing the dust and revealing the brilliance of burl and mahogany diamonds radiating out in a dizzying pattern.

"I know a secret Richard Carlisle knows nothing about," she said with great relish. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. You oughtn't chastise me for enjoying it."

He followed her through the double doors at the far wall into a small chamber. This room was Venetian-themed, with four-pointed starts nestled in the coffered ceiling and a row of narrow windows that culminated in pointed arches along the length of the outer wall. The grey light refracted through the wobbly glass, casting strange shadows all around.

"Theodore Russell's private study," Mary explained, "but it was the reading room when I was a child." She looked fondly at the far wall, remembering it from long ago. "That whole shelf was full of children's books, all with the most wonderful illustrations. The governess was an especially poor choice – she hated children – so she stashed us in here whenever we came to visit Billy. We must have spent hours, days, here, reading the stories in the books, and making up new ones."

She went over to the bookcase, her hand glossing over the paneling. The case was inset in the wall, and framed by two matching wood-paneled pillars. She skimmed the corner of the left pillar, her nails running down the surface until she found a small crack where the front panel met the side. Curling the tips of her fingers in for grip, she tugged at the front panel. She was expecting the fanfare of a great reveal, but to no avail. Frustrated, she leaned in for a closer look.

"Childhood imagination run wild?" Richard asked skeptically.

She threw him a reproachful glance over her shoulder, and returned to the panel. Finding the crack again, she pulled at it with more energy. Still nothing. As Richard looked on, now highly entertained, she braced her feet on the floor, and with great effort tugged once more on the panel in an exasperated huff. At last the panel snapped open, sending her reeling back into Richard's arms. He grasped her shoulders, ending with a gentle caress that was not strictly necessary to help her recover her balance, his gaze directed over her head at the secret hallway the panel had revealed.

"Just a bit stubborn," she said, referring to her struggle with the door.

"Then I suppose it is my turn to admit you were right," he offered, approaching the door and looking into the darkened tunnel.

"You are not the only one capable of uncovering secrets. Hard to believe it was hidden under your nose the whole time – I assumed the Russells told you!" It was unbelievable to her that not a single one of his renovators had discovered it; after all, she had found it when she was seven. "You probably could have put it to good use for one plot or another."

"A hatch for the hatchet-man, you mean?" he asked with a quirk of his eyebrow. "I know this space from the floor plan, but we all thought it was a structural support. And the Russells must truly be secretive. They never said a word."

"Come on," she said abruptly, brushing past him to get to the door. Their exploration was bringing back childhood memories of quests and fairy tales, and she was feeling mischievous. "I'll give you a tour."

The pillar was narrow and they both had to squeeze sideways to get through, but once inside the hallway widened. Richard reached for his gold lighter, illuminating the space with a click of the mechanism. The light bounced off the unfinished brick walls, revealing a passage that stretched far beyond into the darkness. The dust was much heavier here, and their movements disturbed it further, making the air thick with the musty smell of a long-sealed room.

"Legend has it," Mary began conspiratorially, "that Theodore Russell had a secret." The dank atmosphere and the halo cast by the flame inspired her to adopt the tone of a guide for one of those insipid ghost tours people gave of allegedly haunted old houses.

She glanced back at Richard to make sure he was following her, and almost gasped when she caught sight of his eyes sparkling with amusement in the yellow glow of his lighter. He did on occasion take her breath away, when she caught him regarding her tenderly. In retrospect she should have known that he loved her simply from those looks, although recently they had been fewer and far between. If she was honest, even his looks of anger and frustration thrilled her because of the passion that lurked underneath; it was the cold appraising glances he began to cast in her direction over Christmas that she could not bear. She was glad to see the sparkle return.

"He was in love," she continued, drawing him further into the darkness. "But not with his wife."

At this, Richard smirked, already caught up in her tale.

"In fact, he was in love with his wife's sister. But she never knew, and she married someone else. So he settled for the next best alternative, and decided to build himself a grand country manor."

They continued along the passage as it turned sharply to the right, then jogged left again, tracing the outline of Haxby's east wing from within the walls.

"Remarkable. We must be between the library and the servant's staircase right now," Richard observed as he traced their route in the air with his hand. "Go on."

"Haxby took a long time to build – Theodore was not as adept as you at wrangling laborers – and over the course of construction, his true love's husband died. He was overjoyed – at last he had an opportunity. He was a schemer, as you might suspect, and suggested that she should not be alone in mourning, so she came to live with the Russells. With her settled under his roof, all Theodore wanted was to help her with her... grief."

As they turned again, the hallway widened, with enough room for shelving on the left wall. The racks were full of dusty wine bottles.

"Much to both of their astonishment, his sister-in-law begins to share his feelings. But now they live in a relatively small town house, under the watchful eye of the family and servants, and can find no way to be alone together. It was agony – so close to each other, yet so far away."

Richard pulled a bottle down from the rack and brushed off the label, squinting to read it in the poor light. "Alsace-Lorraine," he noted, "a good vintage. So what happened next?"

"Theodore, of course, has a plan. He instructs his builders to put in a secret corridor, off the blueprints, at his new manor, one that leads from his private study upstairs to his intended lover's bedroom."

They continued down to where the passage turned again, this time revealing a staircase that stretched from wall to wall going up. As they ascended, Mary resumed her narrative. "He begins working in his office late into the night, long before the house is finished, while his sister-in-law takes to retiring early in the evening. After a while, this seems simply to be habit, so when the family finally moves into the country estate, Mrs. Russell does not suspect a thing."

At the top of the stairs was another turn, before coming to a dead end.

"They waited for two long years for the house to be finished so they could be together," she said as she bent down to unhook the latch hidden in the floor. Standing again, she caught Richard's eye. "Can you imagine how it must have been, when Mr. Russell opened this door for the first time?"

She pressed against the wall and it swung out, engulfing them both in the white light of the winter afternoon.


	3. Fantasy

**AN: Ok, wow. Thank you, thank you, **_**everyone**_**, for your amazing feedback. You are all so lovely! I don't know what to say except that this first-time fic writer is very grateful. **

**As for the story. I keep wanting to get to the action-ier fun stuff, only to discover there are so many problems these two have to discuss first that the show left unexamined! So bear with me for the therapy session – let's just say they have a lot of issues.**

* * *

**3. Fantasy**

Temporarily blinded by the light flooding into the corridor, Mary and Richard paused for moment as their eyes adjusted. Slowly the world outside the door came into focus; Mary noted from the peeling floral wallpaper that this room had yet to be touched by Richard's builders.

He approached the door and pushed it open further, examining the squeaky hinges with a look of amazement. "If only I'd known the history of the house I bought," he mused. "The original owner certainly went to great lengths to keep his love a secret."

"Perhaps it would have been better," Mary posited, "if he had just come out and admitted it, saving himself all the trouble of his machinations."

"Perhaps all the trouble he took to conceal his desires only affirmed how deeply-held they really were."

He was still in the doorway, and Mary had to squeeze past him to get to the outer room. As she brushed against him, he stilled her with a gentle touch to her arm.

"Theodore sounds like a cad," Richard murmured, and they both knew he was not talking about Mr. Russell.

"He was a bit of a Machiavelli," Mary replied softly, her gaze fixated on the starched collar of his white shirt. "But at least he put up a good fight for what he wanted. I suppose that has to matter."

Bringing his free hand up to caress her cheek, his thumb settled under her chin and he tilted Mary's face to look at him.

"The only thing that matters is if he won."

He kissed her, gently at first but with increasing force as she began to kiss him back. The narrowness of the corridor and his hand on her arm meant that she could not wrap her arms around her neck as she wanted to, so she settled them around his waist instead, bringing them closer together than they had been in a long time. She missed the intimacy; the secret embraces in the garden and the stolen kisses in the hall, two years of wanting him in spite of herself and he always willing to indulge her passion.

She had never thought of them as two people in love – far from it. But she could not deny their mutual attraction, and regardless of whether they were shouting or laughing, she rarely refused his advances. It was all quite innocent; they had little time truly alone, and even then, she reserved her sharp tongue for barbed comments. But once in a while, when one of them had said something so abhorrent that silence was the only response, or when he stopped mid-sentence to look at her in the sunlight, all she wanted in the world was his touch, and he was happy to oblige.

He reveled in their kiss a beat longer before breaking away. Richard always seemed to pull back at exactly the moment Mary needed him the most desperately. Ever the manipulator, he had years' more experience controlling his desire than she, and Mary was certain it was his way of having fun with her.

Annoyed, confused, frustrated – all her usual emotions when Richard was around – she pushed past him into the bedroom.

Sensing the moment had passed, Richard returned to the subject of her guided tour. "Did you ever consider, as you weaved this fantastic tale for all the little children of Haxby, that perhaps the real explanation for the corridor is far more mundane?"

"What would that be?" Mary asked, taking in the sight of the forgotten room, with its tarnished chandelier and faded curtains.

"Judging from the copious amount of wine, I would say old Theo had a drinking problem that he did not want his wife to know about."

"And the stairs up to the bedroom?"

"So he wouldn't be seen on the main staircase searching for his midnight brandy."

"Well, that may be the factual explanation, but don't you prefer the romantic lie?" she asked dreamily, still in her tour guide voice.

"Never," Richard said earnestly. Then he paused for a second, cocking his head to the side as he appraised her. "But you do, don't you?"

Once again, they were no longer talking about Theodore.

"For someone cold and careful, you have a surprising inclination towards the imaginary."

Mary had no idea what he was talking about, so she looked out the window at the snow dotting the lawn that stretched along the drive as far as the eye could see. They really were isolated out here – no phone, no people for miles. Should she be concerned, she wondered, alone with him in such a mercurial mood? Or perhaps it was he who should worry; she was feeling equally erratic from her mixed up feelings and lack of sleep.

"Wasn't that what happened between us? You came to prefer the ghost of Captain Crawley to me?"

"What ghost? He was flesh and blood. Much as I am," she replied, hoping the allusion to the physical would throw him off his train of thought.

Richard was not so easily deterred. "You were not in love with the crippled soldier that returned from the war, the one who couldn't walk, couldn't dance with you, the one who wouldn't even declare himself to you because he was engaged to someone else. You were in love with the idea of him. The reality was unavailable to you in every way, yet you adored the spectral version that existed in your mind."

"It is possible to love someone from afar, even if they are out of your reach," she said, turning from the window to face him. Intending to wound, she added: "I expect you know something about that."

"It is possible, yes," he said, ignoring the jab, "so long as you don't fictionalize them completely. Crawley could do no wrong in your eyes! That's not love, that is... fantasy."

"Because he is not as flawed as you are, you've demoted him from human being to figment of my imagination?"

"Because he wasn't there."

He paused, his arms hanging open at his sides in a gesture of incomprehension, and Mary could see that he was genuinely hurt by the recollection of the whole situation.

"Of course he was always hanging about on the periphery," he added, "a constant annoyance." A quick turn of phrase, and Mary was relieved he was back to anger. She was comfortable with an angry Richard. A hurt one she did not know what to do with.

"But he was not actually courting you," he continued. "He did none of the things I did for you. Yet I always felt like I was being compared to him; or rather, what you imagined he would do in whatever circumstance we were in. Do you know what that's like? Your every action measured against some sort of ideal that no real person could live up to?"

Did she ever. 'Welcome to the life of an upper class woman in England,' she wanted to exclaim! But never in her wildest imagination did she conceive that Richard felt restricted by similar circumstances. Not brash, calculating Richard, who never allowed anyone the upper hand; who could, and would, flaunt the most basic conventions. He, of all people, was free of expectations – Mary attributed much of his success to that very fact. To come from nothing meant there was no one you could disappoint. And it was easier to break the mold if you knew what it felt like to have nothing to lose.

It saddened her that she had been the cause of his awakening from such an impudent dream. He had found in her someone he did not want to disappoint, and suddenly, there was something dear enough to him that would go to any lengths to keep. Had it really been she who introduced him to the awful idea of impossible expectations? Mary would not wish that kind of restriction, the kind she lived, on anyone, especially someone so magnificently unbound. If she had come to think of him as a lion in a cage, she realized that she had never questioned whether the animal had once been free.

Yet he never wanted _her_ to be free, she thought resentfully. She held no illusions that his feminist inclinations extended to his own wife – no, he expected her to belong to him. She could vote, or drive, or smoke, or defy whatever convention she liked, but she doubted she could disregard him. 'Don't ever cross me,' he had told her. At least he was clear – life with Richard would be trading one set of boundaries for another. The question, she supposed, was which did she prefer? Or rather, which could she most turn to her own advantage?

"I know that ideal or reality, Matthew would not threaten me," She pointed out. "He would not coerce me into marriage."

"No, he wouldn't, would he?" Richard readily agreed. "He wouldn't marry you at all."

They stood staring at each other in silence.

After a long pause, Mary slowly recovered her wits. It was remarkable how they could still hurt each other. "He behaved honorably. I don't expect you to understand."

"Ah, that honor again," he replied, nodding. "Honorable intentions rarely turn out well. And what did it get you? What did it get Lavinia? Did that honor do one bit of good for anybody, except for elevating the self-esteem of young Captain Crawley himself?"

Richard had managed, somehow, to tap into the exact line of reasoning that had been in her head ever since he left. Or perhaps it was his way of thinking that had infiltrated her mind, a frightening idea. But the fact that they had each independently come to the same conclusion was telling – was she really beginning to favor the unscrupulous pirate over the virtuous knight? That the answer was certainly 'yes' scared her – it almost seemed for a moment that she was trying to talk herself into the idea that wrong was right. And that whatever circular logic Richard used to justify his actions was starting to influence hers as well.

"You don't have to convince me," Mary told him frankly. "It's true. Matthew's behavior has been above reproach, at least when it comes to me."

"Well I wouldn't go that far."

"He never said a word out of place, he never tried to take me away from you outright. Until the very end…"

"No, he wouldn't, would he?" Richard paused. "That does not surprise me at all. Because honorable people do not steal other people's fiancés. He may insidiously poison your mind against me -"

"He was happy I was marrying you and moving on with my life!"

"He was happy to stand on the sidelines, wearing a veneer of unselfishness, all the while presenting himself as the 'nicer' alternative to me." Richard's self-awareness always caught Mary off-guard. She sometimes thought only she was capable of such cognizance in a world blind to its own faults. And that kind of mindfulness was a quality in others she prized most highly, knowing just how rare it was.

"But of course, you were free to choose," he continued. "And then when it comes down to it, to whom does your allegiance go? The corrupt interloper, or your kind, gentle cousin?"

"I think you are taking who Matthew is and turning it against him," Mary said. Although she had done the same thing herself with Richard, she thought but declined to state aloud.

"I am trying to show you the neat little paradigm he set up. If he is the nice alternative, then I must be the opposite in that black and white universe we began to inhabit."

"He wasn't setting up anything – he was recovering from his ordeal, and planning his wedding -"

"Then explain how you two came to romp around like naughty schoolchildren making mischief for no other reason than the fact that you could. And I was cast as the schoolmaster you had to defy."

She couldn't explain it; her reasons were beyond words at this point, and she doubted he would understand even if she tried. "Perhaps you did that to yourself," she said with a shrug.

"Crawley was manipulating you just as much as I was."

"So you admit it?" she asked incredulously.

"Of course I admit it," Richard said with a snort. "That's what love is, isn't it?"

"Manipulation and deceit. Charming."

A small part of her appreciated the candor. Not a lot of people were as honest with her as he was. But it was only a small part.

Richard gestured to the secret passage door. "It's building secret tunnels. It's going to any ridiculous lengths –"

Mary interrupted him, unwilling to hear what she assumed was another seductive lie. "I wish I could believe you. But I don't." She walked to the panel-covered door secret passage and shut it. "I thought we decided this was a tunnel for smuggling liquor, not an elaborate excuse for a love affair."

"Oh, keep your romantic fantasy if you like," he conceded. "At least your version makes a better headline."

A compromise! If she was becoming less rigid in her outlook, then Richard was apparently attempting to meet her halfway. Or almost. He approached her, on his way to the door – apparently they were done with this room. Threading her arm though his, she wondered, "What would our headline be?"

"Corrupt newspaperman and icy aristocrat uncover secrets in old mansion?" he proposed with a gleam in his eye.

"The house's secrets," Mary asked, "or their own?"


	4. Ambition

**4. Ambition **

"So you know a secret about Haxby," Richard pronounced, eying the now-concealed door to the secret passage. "Would you like to see what I've discovered?"

"Why not?" Mary replied. It had been some time since she had last been at the mansion, and it was interesting to see the progress the renovators had made.

Her arm linked through his, she let Richard lead her through the bedroom door and they turned into the hallway.

"Of course, knowing your explorations at age five, perhaps you already know about it," he joked.

He guided her down the corridor and around a couple of turns; the upstairs rooms were even more of a maze than the downstairs public rooms. They passed several empty bedrooms in various states of repair, though up here the rooms looked quite similar in their generic proportions and decor. If it had been up to her, Mary thought as she peered through the doorways, she would have made sure each room was as distinct as the mad patchwork downstairs.

She followed Richard into one of the grander bedrooms, untangling her arm from his so she could wander at will. This room was different from the others. Instead of white moldings and variations on pink floral wallpaper, as many of the smaller rooms featured, this was entirely paneled in a warm brown wood. They were at the far corner of the house, and four enormous windows flooded the room with light; two crystal chandeliers augmented this, making the space even more sparkling than the dirty beige dullness of the rest of the wing. There was scaffolding erected on one side, and she could see that laborers had been working to restore the plaster scrollwork of the ceiling, which was brilliantly crisp and white on one side and muddily crumbled where the work had yet to resume.

Opening a small interior door in the paneling, Richard beckoned her to come closer, and Mary couldn't help but bite her lip. He looked wickedly sensual leaning against the frame, his finger curled in, drawing her to him, but this was offset by the fact that he knew it and was clearly enjoying her response. She recovered her senses enough to roll her eyes, feeling this was enough of a put down to allow her to approach with her decorum intact. He allowed her to enter the darkened room first, and she jumped as heard the door close behind them.

Alone, in the dark, in a room she knew nothing about, with a man she could never hope to understand. How did she wind up in this situation? As he brushed her arm she wanted very badly to lean back into his embrace, and then suddenly the room was illuminated – he had only been reaching for the chain on the light bulb.

They were in what appeared to be a closet. It was large by Downton standards, easily the size of one of the servant's rooms, but compared to the grandeur of Haxby it felt like the smallest room in the house. Dark wood paneling to match the outside room came up about a third of the way up the wall, and topping this were matching wooden poles for hangers. But it did not seem like the room had been used for clothes, because the pale green walls above the paneling were obscured with writing. Mary leaned in for a closer look, and realized the scrawls consisted of signatures, hundreds of them, starting to the left of the door and wrapping around nearly the entire room.

"Welcome to Haxby's walk-in guestbook," Richard said with sweep of his hand. She looked at him in confusion, and a slight bit of wonder. "This seems to have been the main guestroom," he explained, "and these are the signatures of everyone who ever stayed here."

She looked around again, at the countless names and endless variations of handwriting, and granted that this was indeed impressive. "A history," she exclaimed, "like a family tree of entertaining."

"Exactly. Look," he indicated the very beginning of the timeline, "Here is the earliest – 1844. And see the name?" It was Mr. Theodore Russell himself, his elaborately-scrolled writing terminating in all manner of swirls and swooshes.

"Mr. Russell left his mark in more ways than one," Mary observed.

"No signature on his secret passage though," Richard added. "But he clearly spent time in the guest room."

"Perhaps he was even more of a cad than we suspected."

She took a moment to look closer at the names. There were many she recognized – Benjamin Disraeli, William Carrol, Mary Ann Evans, and W.G. Grace. There were many family names whose descendants she probably knew. Each had carefully signed their name, followed by the date of their visit. Richard pointed to a name halfway down the left wall – 'Lord Patrick Crawley, 1862.' Her grandfather, she realized with delight. "He must have stayed here when Downton was being built," she mused.

"And here," he pointed out. 'Lord Patrick Crawley' followed by 'Lady Violet Crawley, 1869.'

"Just after they were married," she said with a faraway smile.

It was a map of the lives of each Russell who had occupied Haxby, Mary pondered as she walked along the wall examining the names. Some were political – Theodore's guests were politicians, ambassadors; the next generation more frivolous, and she recognized names from literature, art, and the stage. Some periods were international – every name was Baron von something, or Duc de something else. Other eras were strictly the best of the English aristocracy. Mary wondered especially about the Russell who had presided over the manor in the 1880s – his corner of names was markedly outlandish, featuring what she presumed were many nom de plums. She decided her favorite was 'Comtesse Kiki de Colibri' whose name appeared several times, and in various combinations with others – first alongside Comte Leonard de Colibri, and later beside several men who did not share her last name. The Countess of Hummingbirds was rather a free spirit, Mary surmised.

"Please tell me you're planning to preserve such an important historic record," she said, returning to face Richard. "Put it in the contract – whoever buys Haxby must keep the wall of names."

"Certainly I'll preserve it," he said with a hint of regret. "I'd rather been hoping we could have added to it."

Mary could only imagine the names to appear under their reign! Tabloid celebrities, moving picture stars. Burlesque queens and _elected_ politicians. "Goodness," she said to herself, before realizing she had also said it aloud. The Russells would have been horrified. Well, except perhaps for the friend of the hummingbird. She consoled herself with the idea that she would have balanced out the tawdry with her own particular brand of high society.

"Have you got a pen?" she asked.

"I rather thought the honor was reserved for overnight guests," Richard said as he pulled a blue enamel fountain pen from his jacket pocket.

"If the Countess of Hummingbirds gets included in Haxby's history, we at least ought to have a mention."

He chuckled as he handed the pen over, watching as she carefully selected a space on the blank part of the wall. She signed her name, right at eye level, her delicate script contrasted to the others in its restraint. She presented the pen to Richard and stepped back; he signed with greater flourish directly under hers. "There," he said as he added the date, "for posterity." They both regarded their scribble for a moment –'Lady Mary Crawley & Sir Richard Carlisle, 1919.'

"I think you know what I would rather it read," Richard said wistfully.

She had nothing to say to that statement, even if, for that second only, she agreed.

"At this rate," she said, simply to fill the silence as Richard opened the door for her to pass into the larger room, "both of us could come back in fifty years and our names will remain the same."

Richard seemed to take this in. "Call me old-fashioned," he commented, "but I think a woman's name should change when she is married." In her poorly-chosen comment, Mary had been alluding to the fact that, if Richard were to publish her scandal, her chances of marrying and acquiring a new name were greatly diminished. But he had interpreted the remark in light of what he assumed would be her eventual marriage to Matthew, where her name would indeed remain 'Crawley.'

"It's no different than when I was engaged to Patrick," she replied, only now realizing how odd it was that she was currently contemplating marriage to a _second_ man who shared her last name. "And to go that route means the eventual addition of 'Lady Grantham' to the string of titles."

"I wanted to give you a better life than that," Richard said with an unhappy shake of his head.

"Better?" she asked. "Or just different?"

"I expect any escape from the prison you call Downton would be an improvement."

"It isn't a prison," she denied, albeit half-heartedly.

"No? So what now, Mary? You're to live out your days as the wife of a country solicitor, under your parent's roof and the watchful eyes of your extended family, waiting for them to die so you can eventually become Lady Grantham once you're too old for it to matter?"

His remarks cut deep, the harsh light of his analysis intersecting with her own fears for her future.

And how iniquitous those fears were, she reflected. She was always supposed to be Lady Grantham, the house's mistress and not it's owner – it was all she was raised to do. She could hardly begrudge Matthew his sacrifice to Downton when the very same thing was expected of her. Yet she did, regardless, just as she begrudged her family for maneuvering her into the position of perpetual lady-in-waiting. And the guilt of her selfish desire to be more than that was overpowering.

But Richard did not think her need for escape selfish. Well maybe he did, but he would couch it in the terms of aspiration or ambition. To him, wanting more was never a fault. And she desperately envied this particular kind of greed.

"It's tragic to see potential wasted," he told her. "I see it too often. People limit themselves, and I hate to see that to happen to you. Of all people, you have no excuse!" he exclaimed in frustration, as if envisioning what he would have achieved had he her advantages and position. "My God, for _you_ to be relegated second in line to anything, especially to a stuffy old house six hours from nowhere, is an abomination."

The hint regard for her in his voice, coupled with the admonishment and his disappointment, was too much a conundrum for Mary to unpack just now, and, suddenly weary, she sank against the window sill.

"I can give you everything."

Mary found his shift to the present tense unnerving. She preferred their discussion remain in the realm of the theoretical – 'can' was just a little too close to 'won't', and the feeble hope that had been building in her heart could not bear another closed door right now.

"At what cost?" she sighed. "Here we are, another stuffy old house six hours from nowhere where I could rot my life away." Her eyes travelled the room, observing the cracked plaster in the ceiling, the several coats of uneven paint on the doorframes, all the indicators of character in an old house but also the telltale signs of countless lives that had passed.

Richard quirked an eyebrow at the severity of her wording, a silent acknowledgment of her admission that Yorkshire holds no future for her.

"For some unfathomable reason, you wanted Downton," Richard said, frustration growing in his voice, "the one thing I could not give you. So I gave you the closest thing to Downton I could find, entirely yours, presented on a silver platter. You wouldn't have been trapped here. You wouldn't be second to anyone."

"Whoever said you had to give me anything?" she asked indignantly, hearing her voice rise in response to his own caustic tone.

"I wanted you to be happy. Is that such a crime?" He asked, raking his hand through his hair. "For you it is though – if I had known the indifference that would greet every gesture, I would have reconsidered."

"Indifference!" she cried. "I certainly was not indifferent to your onslaught of gifts and gestures, each one placing me further in your debt."

"Yes, you're right," he admitted loudly. "Resentment would be a more accurate description. Was it the idea of receiving favors from a commoner like me that you found so appalling?"

Their discussion had been escalating into a proper quick-fire shouting match, but at this, Mary had no reply. Clearly their class difference still rankled, though by this point Mary had come to regard him as the one with all the power. She marveled that the man who held her reputation in the palm of his hand could still harbor such a feeling of inferiority.

Calming her voice, she tries to tell him that it isn't true. "That isn't –"

"Should every fiancé of yours," he interrupts, "buy you an estate? Call in favors on your degenerate family's behalf? Do you simply take it for granted that every suitor rearrange his entire life to suit your whims?"

Then Richard, too, calmed his voice, going in for the kill: "Or are you so entitled, so used to having everything handed to you by right of your class, that you've come to expect these kinds of offerings, to the point that no one could ever give you something of meaning?"

Mary had no response. If after all this time he thought everything had been_ handed_ to her, then he did not know her nearly as well as he thought. And she may be cold and careful, but his assertion that she was beyond sentiment entirely was too much for her to take in at the moment. So she turned and walked out of the room.

She ventured down one of the upstairs hallways in what she believed was the direction of the great hall. But unlike Downton, which was easy to navigate because of its square layout, Haxby was planned in the shape of an elongated L. It was difficult to get her bearings in a house bereft of furniture, and after a minute more of walking she was surprised to discover she had been going in the opposite direction of the exit. Also surprising was the fact that Richard had not followed her.

She wanted to believe there were meaningful gifts, gifts that did not coerce or come with strings attached, like Richard's. Like Haxby. But her reserve was a kind of condition, too, she thought; she only gave away pieces of herself when strictly necessary. So perhaps they were both crippled when it came to generosity.

Coming to a dead end, she turned into the room on her left and went to the window to see where she was. They had been in the furthest corner of the east wing, and now she realized she was at the very tip of the L looking across the back terrace to the main part of the house. The view seemed familiar. Looking around, the room was familiar too.

Construction had not reached this part of the house yet, so the Russells' decorative touches remained. She looked at the wallpaper, a fanciful pattern in rust and navy blue featuring a man on a tricycle with an enormous front wheel, chasing a squirrel trailed by a cloud of smoke. Repeated across the wall, the tricycle man seemed to zoom to and fro in an infinite race. It was wallpaper for a young boy and she realized this was Billy's room.

She and Richard had been talking about ghosts. Well what about the ghost that still inhabited the house he bought for her? Billy would not go away.

He had been lovely, a sweet, shy boy who was not interested in girls or parties – he preferred nature. He would take the Crawley girls on walks around Downton and Haxby, pointing out the different trees and flowers, explaining how they grew and flourished. Before the war, he told Mary he wanted to be botanist; that when he came back, he was going to university to study science, and he would to return to Yorkshire to recover native plant life. This was a house that had suited him – it was surrounded by parkland, after all, and he would have been a conscientious caretaker for the manor and its many acres.

From the window, she could see the greenhouse where Billy had tried to cultivate and breed new species of local flowers, though it looked quite neglected now; she should have told Richard to preserve it. She should have told him to keep the wallpaper and the curtains and everything in here – the house would always feel like a museum of the Russells to her, so why try to change it? But Richard did not come from an old family like hers; he was unencumbered by the past. He wanted to remake the house for himself, and she envied him that autonomy.

Everything since the war was topsy-turvy. To her old way of thinking, people like Richard should not be allowed to buy houses and change them. Billy should have had Haxby, taken care of it and cultivated the garden and patched the leaky roof while the house slowly decayed around him, as they did for all the aristocratic families. She should have had Downton. And Richard; he belonged in a brand new penthouse in London, walking distance to his office so he was never too far from work.

Mary wondered what would have happened if her family had fought to break the entail and she really had inherited Downton on her own. It certainly would have improved her marriage prospects. Would she have looked twice at either Matthew or Richard? Without the initial resentment of Matthew as the heir, perhaps her feelings wouldn't have blossomed so strongly – there was a time when she believed a Manchester solicitor was not enough for her. And with the country's most eligible bachelors chasing her impressive dowry, Richard probably would not have made it into her top ten list.

But really, if she had Downton and all the money of her mother's inheritance at her disposal, she could imagine a glamorous life with her illustrious publisher. Weekdays at his home in London; weekends at hers in Yorkshire. Art buying trips to Paris for her, the New York stock exchange for him. She would coerce him away from the office for long, extravagant lunches; he would convince her to cancel her appointments and stay in bed all Sunday. They would have power, prestige, and a wide circle of distinguished friends that they both secretly looked down on. Meeting as equals, they would have represented the best of both of their respective realms – he was the entrepreneurial new money, she the aristocratic old. Assured of their position, they probably would have felt quite secure with this dynamic.

Perhaps this was how people actually saw them from the outside, though it was far from the truth. In reality, they were not equals, and this only exacerbated the personality imbalances in their relationship. And peculiarly enough, while Mary knew they were not equals, she could not tell who actually had more power. Richard had the money and the influence, and she had the refinement and the pedigree, yet they both felt lesser to the other. She was everything he could never be and vise-versa, and instead of making them stronger it simply fueled each insecurity. In the current state of affairs, they actually needed each other. And this seemed to make things worse.

She fancied that if she had the money and power of Downton, they both would have felt like she had more choice in the matter of her marriage. And if she had the ultimate sovereignty to decide for herself what she wanted, she might very well have chosen the brazen upstart over any eligible aristocrat in England.


	5. Passion

**5. Passion**

Mary left Billy's room and wandered back down the hall, now better oriented and fairly sure she was headed in the direction of the entrance. As she passed the guest room where they had been examining signatures she peeked in, looking for Richard, but found only an empty bedroom and the paneled closet door closed.

She returned to the upper logia wondering where he had gone, only to find him perfectly centered in one of the arches, his lithe form leaning casually on the banister and looking over the grand foyer.

Coming up behind him, she asked, "Were you really going to let me leave?"

"Never." He replied, not glancing up. "But I did notice you were going in the wrong direction."

She couldn't decide if his arrogance was compelling or obnoxious. Where Richard was concerned, that quandary was not unusual. "I could have found a servant's staircase, ran downstairs and out the front door, never to return..."

"I thought this morning that you would never return. Yet here are," he said, gesturing to indicate her presence. "Could it be that Haxby is more difficult to be rid of than you'd hoped?"

Mary followed his gaze down, across the elaborately patterned white marble floor of the entry hall, over the ornate plaster and the fluted, flat columns that framed the dozen or so entrances that branched off the main hall to the ground floor rooms. Haxby seems to unfold before her eyes from this perspective, a labyrinth in all directions as far as the eye could see. It felt like a jigsaw puzzle from up here, so many different rooms in so many discordant styles, pieced together haphazardly and intersecting in the neutral zone of the white, classical foyer.

"We were supposed to have parties here," Richard interrupted her reverie. "Grand, wonderful parties – with only the most interesting people. Masquerade balls. Dinner for a hundred. Or perhaps we would shock the neighbors with a roaring jazz band you could hear for miles."

"A bold and modern party?" Mary asked, approaching the banister. Richard's gaze softened as regarded her from under his brow, before returning to look at the great hall.

"You, of course, would be the consummate hostess. The best dressed; oh, certainly the most beautiful, with effortless grace - and everybody would wonder how you made it look so easy."

"And you," she added, playing along, "would be wandering the crowd, ears perked for the next big story."

"Naturally. And everyone would be having such a splendid time that they wouldn't notice the choice information they let slip."

"So Haxby and I were to be but bit players in your spy machine?" Mary asked, enjoying the diversion from their earlier, more serious conversation.

"And we would come up here," Richard continued, too lost in his train of thought to notice hers, "for a break from our hosting duties, to look down at all the sparking people, laughing and drinking and dancing."

Mary could see them, sequined gowns twirling and champagne sloshing from saucer glasses held carelessly by gloved and jeweled hands. She saw people dancing, and men huddled together in business conversation, shouting above the music while their wives looked on annoyed. There were pretty young girls giggling over handsome young men, and clumsy older couples stepping on each other's toes as they struggled to keep tempo with the fast, reckless music. She could even see the jazz band, which they would place on the second floor gallery so the sound drifted throughout the house and out to the terrace, following the sweep of revelers into the warm summer night.

She was so caught up in the vision that she didn't notice how close Richard was to her until she felt his breath on her ear. "And the two of us, up here, above it all. Parties are far more enjoyable when you can stand back for a bit of perspective, don't you agree?" he murmured.

She just nodded in reply, staring down at the empty room as she tried to ignore the goosebumps creeping down her neck, the ones that always seemed to engulf her when he was this near.

"It is our house, after all," he said, and Mary noted again the slip in his speech from the wishful thinking of 'would' into the reality of 'is.' "And we may decide to sneak away for a few moments." His eyes raked slowly from the imaginary partiers below in the direction of what would have been their bedroom. Mary stiffened as his gaze returns to her, and she wondered just quite how she ended up sandwiched between him and the column at her shoulder.

"Now who's inclined to the imaginary?" she asked a bit shakily, finding herself intuitively turning to face him as he leaned in and settled both hands on the banister on either side of her. "Secret trysts in the middle of glamorous parties? That doesn't sound like who we are."

He closed the distance between them, nuzzling her check and slowly trailing down her neck, in fact following the path her goosebumps always took though he could not possibly know that, at long last kissing the point where her collarbone met her shoulder. Why, she wondered, in the middle of winter, did she not choose a dress with a higher neckline?

"Oh I think that's exactly who we are, Mary," he said glancing up, his face now inches from hers.

The banister pressed against her back, and he was so unbearably close that she relented her position, arching to pull away slightly. She glanced over her shoulder to the stone floor that must be twenty feet below, unsure whether it was the precipitous drop on one side or the determined man on the other that was the cause of her sudden dizziness.

"I've seen the way you look at me," he continued, squinting at her through astute eyes. "Even in the beginning – especially in the beginning. You cannot deny we have a potent... chemistry, between us."

"What we have," she said carefully, "is an ignitable fuel that should probably be contained so we don't burn each other to ashes." This sounded melodramatic even to her, but she must get her point across. So he had noticed the occasional look of desire she could not help but cast in his direction - did he notice the more frequent glances of thinly-veiled anger and irritation? "I believe our numerous arguments and constant deceit far outweigh any 'chemistry' you think we share."

"Do you really?" he asked in mock breathlessness, his chin turned up as he regarded her with the same cunning look he would give to one of his informants caught in a lie. "Then why," he emphasized the word, "are you here?"

She paused for a moment to consider. She wanted to believe that she sought him out to finish things once and for all, to tie up loose ends and say what had long gone unsaid. But it was not simply the crude manner of their parting, or his scuffle with Matthew and her lingering guilt over her family's lack of manners that drew her to Haxby today. His remarks the morning he said goodbye to her and Downton for the last time, when he told her he loved her and that she did not love him enough, left so many unanswered questions swirling in her mind. It forced her to reexamine every moment they shared in a different light. And if she were honest with herself, were these questions not tinged with the slightest bit of hope?

Not that she cared to admit this to the man she still regarded as the saboteur of her dreams and aspirations. Though after all she had seen of her family at Downton that night, she was slowly beginning to side with the subversive over the establishment. Perhaps it was the side she belonged to all along.

"I want to know something," she ventured, returning to her checklist of doubts that had been building since their Christmas fight. "When I told you of my... indiscretion," the irony of the politeness of the word contrasted to their current position was not lost on Mary, "with Mr. Pamuk – just what was your reaction?" It had been nagging at her since she was forced to admit the secret to Matthew, and to her father.

"You were there, you saw my reaction."

"I saw you turn a situation to your advantage, something at which you are rather adept. What I couldn't tell was what you really thought about it."

Sensing he no longer had the conversational advantage, Richard backed off slightly - though his arms continued to surround her as he grasped the banister - and Mary was relieved to no longer be hanging half over the ledge. He looked puzzled over the seemingly innocuous inquiry, almost as if the question were some kind of trap. Mary watched him as he pondered an answer; she wondered if he was trying to decide between the truth and a convenient lie.

"Rage," he draws out the word, "was probably my first thought." She could see in his ruthless eyes that this is no convenient lie. "The idea of sharing you with any man, alive or dead, was almost unbearable. Little did I know," he snorted, "that young Captain Crawley would soon be along to make that a daily reality."

She had no reply so he continued. "Mr. Pamuk took what should have been mine," he said darkly, "and I remember thinking how fortunate it was that he was already dead."

The glint in his eye, coupled with his matter-of-fact tone, made Mary catch her breath just as he pushed off the banister and began to pace; in his absence she wondered if she imagined the expression. As he walked in circles like a caged animal, she considered that this was a very dangerous man.

"Then," Richard paused. He took a breath and looked off into space, before looking back at her and resuming his path back and forth on the red carpeting. "Yes I did see the advantage. I can't help it, really, I have always been able to find opportunity where I can," he says with a shake of his head. "And at last, here was something I could do for you. Lady Mary Crawley, who needs nothing and no one, needed my help. It wasn't a bad feeling."

This concession startled her - perhaps the image she tried to project succeeded too well. She was always so cautious about appearing capable on her own; it was true that she did not want anyone's aid. But she knew, too, that no one could be truly independent. If they were to be a team, as he proposed long ago, then maybe it was not simply her contribution to that effort that he was after. What an astonishing notion: he _wanted_ to be the one help her.

"And finally," at this he stopped his pacing and faced her squarely, "I remember thinking that you were spectacular."

Before last week, she would have dismissed this as highly improbable. Now, it was the idea of Richard admitting it to her – somewhat sober and in the cold light of day – after all that had passed between them recently which seemed utterly impossible.

At her uncomprehending expression, he continued: "There you were, in a desperate situation, forced to ask for help, which you hate, and you were as… _grand_ as ever. In my work, I hear confessions on a fairly regular basis, but you..." He trails off smiling, almost fondly. "You shed no tears, offered no excuses. You even turned the tables on me and called me out for my lecturing." He said with a slight laugh. Then, quite seriously: "You were marvelous."

Mary was certain that surprise emanated clearly from her features. Marvelous? She did not feel marvelous at the time of her visit to his office. Nor did she feel especially spectacular now. In fact, after Richard's detailed description of her confession, she found herself thinking of someone else's reaction to her admission, which brought her to the reason she asked the question in the first place. "Would you like to know Matthew's reaction when I told him what I told you?" she wondered.

"No."

This surprised her too - surely he would appreciate a favorable comparison to his rival.

"Even if the verdict lands squarely in your corner?"

She had planned to tell him what Matthew said to her – that there was nothing to forgive her for, that it was all in the past. Flooded with relief at the time, she had seen it as a kindness. Initially.

"If there is one person's perspective I don't care to know, do you not think it would be his?" Richard asked as he approached her.

She had planned to tell him that in Matthew's kindness, she had discovered a worrying thread of detachment, one that she could trace far back, to Lavinia's death and before.

"His opinions about your conduct are immaterial."

She had planned to tell him that, while Matthew's intentions were noble in letting her off the hook, his reserve made her question whether he cared more for being noble than for her.

"I will not be compared to Matthew Crawley."

She had planned to tell him that in this instance, she preferred Richard's anger and manipulation to Matthew's distant fairness any day.

She doubted the Pamuk affair would ever be truly in the past for Richard as Matthew claimed it was for him. Richard wanted her, quite desperately she had come to appreciate. And he wanted to have her first. So while he may forgive her for the incident, and he may turn it to his own advantage, Mary knew he would never dismiss it as nothing. In a perverse way, she found this reassuring - she would never doubt Richard's passion for her as she was beginning to doubt Matthew's.

She was a fool to underestimate Richard's passion for anything, she thought as he stalked toward her. "I have not come this far," he said, "only to wind up on some score card in your mind opposite a boy soldier-turned-country file clerk."

Taking her wrist, he dragged her against him so she could look him directly in the eye. She could see it was this indignity, more than anything else, that Richard found so abhorrent.

Threading his fingers through her hair, he pulled her head to his so their foreheads met. Richard had never been reluctant to touch her, she recognized, and they had certainly been in this situation before – she thought back to the several instances when he found no quarrel with seizing her to emphasize a point. And while intellectually she resisted his grasp, and the audacity behind it, the unrestrained fervor in the move never ceased to thrill the more primal part of her heart.

Her free hand rested on his shoulder, and she tilted her chin up to kiss him – he always captured her, but this time she wanted to make the first move. Their lips just brushed as she heard the front door creak on its hinges, followed by Matthew's inquisitive cry: "Mary?"


	6. Violence

**6. Violence**

"That miscreant bastard son of a bitch," Richard muttered as he freed Mary's wrist and stormed past her towards the stairs. "Crawley!" He called out loudly, so loudly it made Mary's heart jump. She watched, paralyzed for a moment, as he descended to the main floor where Matthew stood. He had called her grand earlier; the incongruous thought that Richard himself looked rather grand as he lorded down his great staircase flashed through her head.

She soon recovered her faculties and dashed after him, and he turned at the bottom of the stairs to catch her eye. "Stay there." Mary froze, his tone leaving no room for argument.

Returning his attention to Matthew, he said simply, "Get out."

Matthew ignored him and looked up the stairs. "Mary? There you are. We have visitors at Downton, everyone is looking for you – what are you doing here?"

With no preamble, Richard grabbed him by the top of his jacket and started to drag him in the direction of the front door. Surprised, Matthew went along a few steps before digging his foot into the floor and spinning out of his grasp, his fist connecting with Richard's side. Richard pulled back his left arm and hit Matthew with a quick jab, twisting his fist before impact for extra power, and finished with a right cross that made the younger man's head snap to the side as he stumbled back.

Mary watched from her place on the stairs, her horror at the repeat performance mitigated by her distance. From up there they almost resembled actors in a choreographed dance. She knew better than to intervene – Papa's attempt to quell the violence had only resulted in an intermission, and this was the second act.

Quickly recovering his bearings, Matthew's fist connected with his opponent's cheek, splitting the skin and drawing blood. Richard shook his head at the blow as he touched the wound and stumbled back. His fists at the ready, Matthew jumped forward with a powerful jab but neglected to jump back soon enough. Within easy reach, Richard counted with a blow to the stomach followed by an uppercut to the chin. At this a classic knockout combination, Matthew wobbled and fell to his knees; Richard caught his arm as he fell and eased him down to the marble floor to prevent him from cracking his head on the hard stone.

Alarmed, Mary rushed down the stairs. Glancing between the two men, she decided that Matthew was the more hurt and crouched down to cradle his head in her hands. Matthew blinked up at her several times, stunned, and sat up slowly with a groan. Richard stood over them, his hands still curled into fists. Mary was ready to roll her eyes at the defensive position when suddenly Matthew pushed himself up, recovering his footing with great speed to stand opposite the publisher, ready for round two.

Still on the floor, Mary clutched at Richard's jacket. "Stop!" she demanded. "You've made your point."

"No I haven't. He's still here," Richard said, eyeing his adversary.

"And I won't leave without Mary," Matthew replied as Richard bent down, grasping her hand to help her up.

Now on her feet again, Mary stepped back a pace so she could eye both men equally. "Matthew," she began sharply, "go home. Richard, stop this ridiculous rematch."

Matthew's jaw clenched at her dismissal, and he eyed the two of them with suspicion.

"What did you do?" He accused Richard. "Whatever threats you used to lure her here, it isn't going to work. Mary, you don't have to listen to the rubbish he is telling you."

"She was fickle enough to leave me for you – why do you imagine she won't change her mind again?"

It was Mary's turn to be offended. "I'm hardly fickle," she interjected, entering the argument against her better judgment.

"Prove it," was Richard's reply.

"She won't change her mind…" Matthew began.

"You want _me_ to prove my devotion?" Mary asked Richard.

"…because I haven't proven myself to be despicable."

"You do respond well to a challenge," he told Mary. To Matthew: "And I believe Lavinia would disagree with you."

At Matthew's enraged expression and newly-raised fists, Mary stepped in between them. "If we had pistols at dawn, I'd say duel and get it over with. But it's afternoon, and we have no furniture, much less a gun rack."

None of them said a word for the moment; no one moved. It occurred to Mary that perhaps bringing up the subject of duel, even in jest, was rather a bad idea.

"Is this about the scandal he is threatening to publish?" Matthew asked finally, backing off. "It's not important, Mary," he assured her. "We'll get through it together. Whatever you're doing here, it's not worth it. Come home."

She took a deep breath. "I will be home later," she replied carefully, glancing away to avoid Matthew's disappointed eyes.

At this Richard said nothing, but she could feel his gaze searing into her – did she really believe he would let her go home, after all this?

Silence descended on the great hall; it was as quiet as Haxby had ever been. Matthew tightened his lips as he contemplated what to do next, while Mary continued to trace the intricate tile pattern of the floor with her eyes. Richard stood very straight and tense, as if poised to attack at any moment.

But it was Matthew's turn for attack. Inhaling deeply, he raised his head to address Richard. "I'll go. Because she asked me to. You see that's the difference. I want what is best for Mary. You want what is best for you."

He was right, and no one in the room would disagree. For Mary, it encapsulated her predicament. Did she prefer the man who would selflessly let her go, or the man prepared to keep her at all costs? She knew which one she _should_ want. Yet she could not quite admit which one she needed.

Lying awake one sleepless night, Mary had entertained the most unusual fantasy. She imagined herself married to Matthew, living a happy and quite life, while at the same time carrying on with Richard a torrid affair. It was not so impossible an idea. While she was with Richard she had loved Matthew – loved his kindness and virtue, his noble nature and his selfless heart. So it was not difficult to imagine the opposite as well – committed to Matthew, she could see herself lusting for Richard; for his power, his passion, even his maneuvering that made life so interesting.

As she daydreamed, she realized this fantastical scenario helpful in defining the elemental difference between the two men. For while she could envision an affair with Richard lasting months, perhaps years, into her marriage to Matthew, she knew from experience the reverse was untenable. In the first narrative, Matthew would want for her what she wanted for herself – to the point, she wondered, if he would simply let her go into the arms of another man, comforted with the knowledge that she would return to him and their quiet life when she was ready. And of course Richard would have no qualms about stealing her away, even temporarily. But the second instance, the reality she lived the last two years, had established that Richard would not tolerate her infidelity to him, physical or emotional. And Matthew had proven too virtuous ever to try.

"That is your problem, Crawley," Richard began, and Mary could tell he was gearing up for a counter-assault. "You think a little selfishness is a bad thing; that a selfless world would be a better world. You want to live in a universe of self-righteous martyrdom where everybody sacrifices what they want for some nebulous greater good."

"You assume," he continued, "that what you want diverges from what is best, that people have no common interests and no shared desires. I believe Mary's and my interests align – what is best for me might be best for her too, something you cannot quite fathom. And I am willing to go to any lengths to protect our interests."

"And I am not? I almost gave up my legs – my life! – for Mary and my country."

"The war is over. It's time for the sacrifice to end."

"I fought for honor," Matthew replied sincerely, "and I will continue to. That is worth any sacrifice."

"Then you are committed to what you call honor, not to Mary. How can she rely on someone willing to give everything away in a second?"

Mary found herself caught up in the philosophical debate. She realized they were talking about her, and at the same time they were not. These two men had fundamentally opposing perspectives, and their antipathy was not rooted solely in their competition for her affection. Each had spent their lives fighting, in one way or another, for what they believed, and each lived successfully according to his own principles. She could not say that either had failed due to the path they chose – Matthew emerged from any trial with his integrity intact, while Richard never let anything get in the way of his ambition.

The question she was faced with, then, was what did she believe? Frankly, she could not side with either entirely. She may be ruthless, as Richard once said she was, but she had principles too. She believed there were higher causes worth sacrificing for, though she also knew from experience that sometimes life demanded senseless sacrifice in the guise of righteousness.

In retrospect, she had not been as lucky as either Matthew or Richard. Like them, she had tried to live her life according to her own credo and no one else's, though she had less to show for it. Her fight for Downton yielded nothing, her fight for liberation led to scandal, her fight for love resulted in the current situation – this Socratic debate in the middle of a construction zone.

And compelling as this dialogue might be, she realized they would come to no agreement. For her part, she recognized that love was more than an intellectual discourse, but in a way their conversation was as essential to each man's spirit as anything else.

"Not that I am not thrilled to be the cornerstone of this little debate, but this is degenerating into the kind of argument that would take place on your editorial page," she interjected, looking in Richard's direction before turning to face Matthew, "or in one of your law society meetings." She sighed, looking between the two. To Richard: "You are bleeding. Matthew may have a concussion. I suggest we call it a day."

"Now there is a good idea," Matthew remarked to Mary. "I wish you would come with me."

"I'm staying here," she replied as coolly as she could manage. Part of her wanted to go home with Matthew right now, very much. But she felt like she had started something with Richard, either today or two years ago, and she had to see it through to some kind of end, on her own terms, before she could return to Downton.

"Alone with... him."

"I do not require a chaperone, thank you."

He looked at her, disheartened, for a moment, before nodding in seeming understanding and turning on his heel to walk out. "If you're not back home by nightfall, I will return with a search party."

"Look for her in the secret passage," Richard called out with a smirk as the younger man walked out the front door.

"And you," Mary said, spinning to face him, "don't look so victorious. I'm not finished with you yet."

His expression didn't change. "You prefer my company to his this afternoon – a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence," he said, echoing her earlier words. "You oughtn't chastise me for enjoying it."


	7. Comfort

**AN 1: I've had these next two chapters written for such a long time that, actually publishing them, I am rather anxious to see how they fare in the world! Like malintzin in her excellent story **_**The Healing Process**_**, I found Mary's guilt in Lavinia's death intriguing and had to explore it further, so this jumps in time from their current conversation at Haxby to the day of the funeral. **

**AN 2: Thank you everyone again for the amazing feedback – your comments always make me think and reevaluate and I enjoy each and every one of them so much. **

**To answer a couple of questions:**

**To dd23 – You are right that Downton is much older than 100 years, I was only referring to what the actual Downton (Highclere Castle) says about its major transformation in 1838, which was completed in 1878 and led to the current house. I'm just guessing there was some construction along the way. And fudging some details…! **

**To Layla – I think **_**Mary thinks**_** Matthew may let her go to the arms of another man, because I think she thinks she can walk all over Matthew in a way that she can't with Richard. Personally, I can't decide how things would really unfold in that situation, but I could maybe see Matthew letting something like that happen, only because he uses Mary's own guilt to control her (the one weapon Richard avoids). But I totally see your point! And Mary knows about the secret passage because she found it when she was a child visiting Haxby. Theodore Russell is the Russell who built Haxby, a few generations back from Billy.**

**Again, many thanks for the insightful comments!**

**With that out of the way, here is Chapter 7. It's really a pair with Chapter 8, so stay tuned for that on Saturday.**

* * *

**7. Comfort**

She approached Richard, still wearing his smug expression, and took the handkerchief from his breast pocket. She raised it to his cheek, dabbing gently at the wound Matthew had inflicted. Despite the injury, she had to concede that Richard had proven a more than even match for the younger man – Matthew looked about as dazed as bird that had flown mistakenly into a window pane after Richard nearly knocked him out. Perhaps that was the end of it, now that each had demonstrated they could get the better of the other. Though Mary doubted it.

Richard did not seem to mind the attention as she fussed over him, staring at her through eyes that were half amused, half something else – for a second she might have called his expression forlorn. But this vanished into irritation as she dabbed the cut a little too hard, and he grunted in annoyance. The blood had started to dry around the gash, and Mary knew from the minimal medical knowledge she had absorbed during Downton's conversion to a hospital that she should clean and disinfect the wound.

"Surely there is a washroom around here with a working tap," she said, glancing around.

"The only rooms with running water," he began cautiously, "are the kitchens."

Of course. She looked up at him for a beat. "Alright," she allowed with a sigh, inflecting the end of the word up like a question as if to say, 'why not?'

Recalling the abandoned bottle of scotch and thinking it may come in handy, she climbed halfway up the stairs to retrieve it, before turning to meet him on the ground floor again. They walked opposite the stairs in the direction of the ballroom, the sound of their shoes clicking on the floor changing from crisp beats to softer footfalls as they stepped off the marble and onto the oak of the dance floor.

She remembered how they had danced here one afternoon, on one of their visits to review renovation plans. Richard had insisted it was to test the suitability of the parquet for waltzing, maintaining that the seventy-five-year-old floor might be too worn and required replacement, so he swept her into his arms and whirled her around the whole length of the ballroom and back. Their only music was the rattle of construction noise, offset by her giggles as he whispered the phantom beat, "one, two, three – one, two, three," jokingly in her ear.

As they spun, the sunlight streaming in through the wall of French doors and bouncing off the half-polished floor had drawn her attention and she'd looked out, catching sight of two laborers outside over Richard's shoulder. The men in overalls were patching the outside terrace, but they had stopped their work to look in, noses practically pressed against the glass, diverted by the dancing couple. For a moment, she saw herself through their eyes – an elegant young woman in the arms of her handsome fiancé, waltzing away a carefree afternoon on the cusp of a glittering future.

She desperately wanted to believe what they saw. Yet that night she nearly cried herself to sleep, thinking that glittering future could never be complete. She may have had her handsome fiancé's esteem, perhaps even his affection; but she had always imagined a glittering future included love.

Now she knew there was more to the story. She knew that love came with all kinds of accoutrements that only complicated a glittering future, and that for them, love seemed like one more discordant room to be awkwardly absorbed into this eclectic manor they had constructed.

Rather like the ballroom, Mary thought with a critical eye. Had it been Mr. Russell who decided the room should be reminiscent of a boarding school refectory? The dirty beige wood paneling and vaulted, beamed ceilings were in sharp contrast to the clean classicism of the great hall, which, in turn, had very little to do with the French provincial folding doors that framed the ballroom's entrance. She felt sorry for the architect – how could anyone hope to lend cohesion to this cacophony?

In the far corner of the room was a discreet door; Richard opened it for her and she went through. The grandness of Haxby ended in the public rooms – here in one the servant's staircases, all frivolity was gone. Mary gripped the iron banister as she walked down the steep concrete stairs, thinking it unkind that servants had to walk these countless times a day.

They emerged in a lower hallway, the bare bulbs in the ceiling unlit, so the only source of light came from the half windows of the small rooms on one side. This part of the house was not completely bare – the Russells had left some of the furniture for the servants' quarters, for what did they need with forty beds and dressers in a London townhouse with a staff of ten?

They continued down the hallway to a larger empty room; passing through, they reached the first of the kitchens. It had three sinks and countless shelves encased in glass, and at the far end, racks for glasses. They would have needed thousands of dishes to fill those shelves, she thought to herself, marveling at the project she had narrowly avoided. Taking a deep breath, Mary peered through the large arch on the wall beside the sink and into the main kitchen.

The room looked much as she remembered it. An entire wall was taken up by a massive stove and red enamel ovens. The surface was not burners but an entire sheet of cast iron so the cooks could arrange different sizes of pans to cook as they pleased; apparently it was brand new and of course top-of-the-line. On the far wall was a counter with another large sink, topped by a row of windows that continued around the corner and onto the next wall, casting strange shafts of light that crossed each other as they flowed into the lower ground floor room.

In the center stood an immense wooden island, topped by an empty pot rack and littered with tools and cigarette packets – the workers had been using this space as a base of operations. Someone had dragged one of the iron servant's beds in as a makeshift sofa, propping it against the island in front of the massive stone cooking fireplace that Richard had wanted to get rid of but the architect insisted would be a draw for fashionable traditionalist chefs. Around the island were several wooden stools, so Richard sat down as Mary went round to the sink to moisten the handkerchief.

Coming back around to his side of the counter, she began to clear the dried blood from his cut while at the same time going to great effort to avoid his gaze. "It's too bad Sybil had to run off with a servant," she ventured, "This is really more her area than mine."

"In more ways than one," Richard replied, indicating their surroundings. "Do you think she would be more comfortable below stairs than above now?"

Mary laughed softly. "And when she comes home to visit, they would prefer Branson's old room to hers?"

He laughed too. "Something about Crawley girls and the servants' quarters…" he teased gently, and Mary was no longer in a joking mood.

Reaching for the scotch bottle, she poured some onto the dry part of the handkerchief and dabbed it at his gash. "Ow!" he exclaimed, his eyebrows coming together in an expression of vexation.

"Medical necessity," Mary said unapologetically, replacing the bottle where she found it and rinsing the wound with water.

"That wasn't very nice," he chided as she finished. She moved to drop the handkerchief to the sink and opened one of the cabinets. Finding a row of cheap glasses, she took two and brought them over to the island, figuring the Scotch had a better use than as antiseptic.

"Perhaps I'm not a nice person," she said as she poured. She offered Richard a glass but he refused, so she kept it herself and took a long sip. The liquid burned her throat but it made her feel slightly steadier.

"No," he said, looking her over as he leaned back against the counter. "I don't think you are."

"My, you're full of compliments..."

"Truly," he said straightforwardly. "You are not a nice person. You _must_ know that…" he insisted with a wrinkled brow and an indulgent tone reserved usually for unreasonable children.

"I am nicer than you," she countered pointedly.

"Well that's not difficult," he acknowledged with a smile.

"In case you have forgotten after going years without encountering it in your world, nice is a virtue. You talk about it as if it were some sort of curse!"

At this Richard chuckled, his eyes creasing at the corners in a way that Mary had to stop herself from finding charming. "Not a curse, exactly, but it is certainly a choice," he mused. "And I have learned to be suspicious of those who choose to define themselves by it," he added as he reached for the second glass resting on the counter, apparently having changed his mind about the scotch.

"You never had that option..." she says, half in jest.

"No, I didn't."

"You prefer a self-aware villain to a smiling one," she deduced, recalling the Christmas fight.

"Certainly, don't you?" he asked, taking a drink. "At least you _know_ I'm wicked," he added with a rueful smile.

This caught Mary off-guard in the midst of their repartee. Self-effacement was not exactly Richard's strong suit. Knowing that, there weren't many other ways she could interpret the remark. Unless… No. She blinked the thought away. They were not going to discuss that, not here. But if he meant it, a voice echoed in her head, if he truly _believed_ it…

"I don't think you're wicked," she said softly, resting her glass on the counter and clasping her hands together. She suddenly wanted to clutch his hands in hers, but she knew that was dangerous.

He swallowed, hard. "You don't?"

She shook her head no, biting her lip and staring at the brown tiled floor. The hopefulness in his voice made her deeply sad. She knew he was not a terrible person. And she assumed he knew this too. If this whole time he believed himself wicked, then what had she accomplished by falsely agreeing with him? She had wanted to hurt him, absolutely, because he hurt her so deeply. Irreparably, she thought at one point, though to truly acknowledge that to herself would mean acknowledging the real extent of his command over her affections, which she had gone to great lengths to ignore.

"Even after…?" he trailed off, his eyes glancing around the room before returning to focus intently on her.

"That was…" Mary began with a deep breath. "I…" she trailed off helplessly.

She was suddenly lost for words – they both were, and she shut her eyes tight against the unwelcome torrent of recollections. Of course they would end up here. Of course they could not avoid it forever. She could not forget, and he could never leave well enough alone. She felt Richard's hand curl around her waist as he threw caution to the wind and pulled her into his embrace. And she clung to him gratefully, burying her face in his neck, unsure whether to laugh or cry.

* * *

Rarely was Mary bereft of speech; rarely was she truly staggered beyond thought. Yet the war had left all of them shell-shocked, she thought, and the horror just didn't seem to end. They walked back from Lavinia's funeral in silence, trailing the others in the party as they left Matthew alone at her grave.

She had meant it when she said she wanted Richard to walk her home – there was nothing she wanted more. Mary was glad for his steady arm and his strong presence, glad for the companionable silence that muted her guilty thoughts.

When they got to the drive leading up to Downton, she stopped dead in her tracks, pulling Richard back with her. The house loomed in front of them down the lane, as foreboding as she had ever seen it. She could not fathom going a step further, in fact her every instinct told her to run in the opposite direction. She could not face another hour at Downton, haunted by Lavina's ghost and Matthew's sorrow and her own wretched conscious.

She looked up at Richard as she held his arm tighter. "I can't go back."

He said nothing, simply waiting for her to continue.

"I can't," she said, "I don't want to. Just… let's go somewhere else, anywhere. But not here."

He gave her hand a squeeze and turned them on a new route, resuming in the direction of Haxby without a word. They walked across the lawn and onto a narrow country lane, a back trail that joined the two estates in a meandering path through the woods. This miniature forest was like another world, and for a little while Mary could lose herself in the green light refracting through the trees and the rustle of leaves blowing in the cool air. When Haxby emerged, black and gold spires gleaming, it looked for a moment like a fairy tale castle several universes away from her own.

Mary shivered as they walked into the entry hall; it was even colder inside than out. "The heating hasn't been finished yet," Richard explained as he grasped her shoulders, the warmth of his body radiating at her back.

"A fire then?" she suggested.

"The fireplaces are being converted to gas," he said sheepishly. "None of them are hooked up. Although…" he thought for a moment, then grasped her hand and led her through the ballroom to a side door. "The kitchen fireplace is not gas – some nonsense about the best cooks demanding a wood fire – perhaps that will do."

She followed him down the servant's staircase, holding his hand for balance. She had not seen this part of Haxby yet. She supposed all below-stairs space was relatively similar – this had the same look as Downton, though without the lived-in feeing.

They ended up in the main kitchen and she took in the surroundings as Richard busied himself looking for firewood in the next room. This room was lived-in in a different sense than Downton; there was no pretense of efficiency here. Bits of piping and half-sealed buckets of paint and plaster were strewn around carelessly, and the space smelt of cigarettes. She saw blueprints rolled out on the kitchen island, and boot-prints across the floor.

"Aha!" Richard said as he appeared in the doorway weighed down with logs. He strode over to the fireplace and dropped the bundle unceremoniously, rolling a bit of newspaper for kindling and lighting it the end with his lighter. Mary watched the flame take hold, climbing from the paper to the first log and then the others, and already the room seemed ten degrees less arctic. "And here I was planning to crack the whip a bit, thinking my workers were lazing around down here instead of working upstairs. Good thing they were."

Mary sat down on the edge of the makeshift sofa in front of the fire, leaning in to feel the warmth. Richard sat beside her and they both looked on, mesmerized by the dancing flames.

Neither of them said anything for a few moments, and as the room grew warmer Mary sank back into the cushions piled carelessly behind her, drawing her knees up to her chest. They may be at Haxby, but her thoughts were still at the graveyard.

"We killed her, you know," she said plainly, still watching the fire. "Matthew and I. She is dead because of us."


	8. Loyalty, Part 1

**AN 1: **

**The good news: this is an early update (for MrsTater, who said she just couldn't wait until Saturday. I can't wait for your story updates either!) **

**The bad news: This chapter just **_**begged**_** to be broken up into two parts. Yeah, I know, I suck. Part 2 in a few days. **

**And look out for a **_**Dispatches from America**_** update tomorrow – after spending all this time in Mary's head it's quite fun to get into Richard's for a bit.**

**AN 2: I've always suspected that something **_**had**_** to have happened between Lavinia's death and the Christmas Special that we don't know about. There has to be something to explain the fact that Mary and Richard were completely different people by the time Christmas came around - Richard was acting like a cartoon villain, while Mary was running around with Matthew like a pair of wayward schoolchildren. So what changed? Ok, it was probably just a convenient narrative device. But this is my take.**

* * *

**8. Loyalty, Part 1**

If Richard was startled at her confession, he didn't show it. "The disease killed Lavinia," he told Mary, his deep voice reassuring through its lack of emotion.

Mary shook her head before facing him directly. "It was Matthew and me," she snorted, "she saw us dancing in the saloon. She watched us kiss. She heard everything he said to me, about how he felt _obligated_ to marry her – is there any less romantic idea?" she asked, exasperated. "She was already ill. But she died of a broken heart."

Richard was silent. And he did not look at her. For a very long time. She did not know what she had been expecting, or why she told him in the first place. But she had to tell _someone. _And he was one of the few people she did confide in, one of the few that knew her darkest secret – and one of the few who would probably not be surprised to learn there was an even blacker spot on her heart.

When he finally did speak, it was not in anger or reprimand, nor was it the soothing tones of consolation. He simply said, "Poor Lavinia."

Mary agreed. But what was the point of her saying so aloud? She couldn't even bring herself to cry.

"She was one of the few genuinely kind people I've met," Richard remembered. "And she deserved better."

"I know," Mary whispered.

They sat for a while longer, each lost in their own thoughts. The only sound in the room was the crackle of the fire.

"I should have listened to you," Mary said eventually, "when you told me to let Matthew go to her. I -" she put her hand to her mouth, the memory overflowing her senses. "I've never seen… It was dreadful."

She closed her eyes against the scene. "Matthew – he just sat there. He said _nothing_. He… She died!" she cried, her voice tired from grief. "She died. In a room full of people. And _no one_ fought for her. She had nothing left to fight for on her own. And Matthew was silent until it was too late." She bit her lip against the tears that suddenly threatened to flow. She had no tears for the funeral, or before, but now Mary struggled to hold them back.

She knew she was not making sense. She knew she had no right to be angry, when she had helped cause the situation in the first place. She knew that Lavinia did not need her empathy now, but she could not help feeling outraged on her behalf. Because Lavinia may have died in a room full of people, but Mary knew she died alone.

"All she wanted was to hear the words 'I love you.'" Mary said, and she knew the feeling desperately. "I don't think it would have saved her, but at least… And Matthew? He was quiet. He didn't say a thing, until she was nearly gone."

She wondered if her presence had been the cause of Matthew's reticence. Richard had seen, long before she did, that that room was no place for her to be. But somehow, she doubted the scene would have been any different, whether she was there or not. And in spite of the shock, part of her was thankful to have seen it, because it reminded her of what was important.

Oh, Mary was furious. She contributed to Lavinia's broken heart too, but she believed Matthew was the one person who could have fixed it, and his dispassionate silence was indefensible. He could have shouted to the rooftops that he loved her, that he couldn't live without her, whatever drivel that sprung to mind in that situation to save someone's mortally wounded spirit.

"Perhaps he didn't want his last words to her to be a lie." Richard said, though it sounded decidedly unlike a defense. Yes, Matthew was too virtuous to imbue Lavinia with false hope. Instead, he whispered something about his own unhappiness as she slipped away, Mary remembered, appalled. Matthew always had to be upright and honest. And honorable, she thought, the word springing to mind with despicable clarity.

"What would you have done?" Mary asked hoarsely; it was only to prove her point because she already knew the answer. Richard was a fighter. He would never have sat dejectedly at her bedside, dumbstruck at her imminent death like a bit player in a bad melodrama. He would have shouted at the doctors, terrified the nurses, threatened God himself with an unfavorable headline if something dared try to take her away from him. He would have told her anything she wanted to hear; he would have said or done whatever was necessary, morality be damned.

The tears she had been holding back finally overwhelmed her, and Mary dropped her head to her knees with a sob. She was devastated, for Lavinia, for herself – for all of them. Richard swiftly gathered her up in his arms, cradling her on his lap as he stroked her hair. She twined her arms around his neck and cried into his shoulder, so relieved there was one person in the world she _knew_ would fight for her. So truly, deeply glad that he was at her side.

"Shh… my darling," he murmured in her ear, "my poor, darling girl…"

He whispered many things to her, so many things she doubted she could remember half of them. She hadn't believed half of them. But she wanted to believe them, so she allowed herself to imagine they were true anyway.

He told her everything was going to be alright.

He told her there was nothing she could have done.

He told her he loved her.

And that he would never let her forget it.

This she found the most impossible to believe; Richard could not possibly love her. He was the one person who knew everything she was capable of, and that could not inspire love in anyone.

But she did believe that he understood. Their alliance was founded on more than convenience, and he knew better than anyone that sometimes people did terrible things with terrible consequences. The fact that he was still here, on her side regardless and trying to ease her regret, was her first experience of the kind of loyalty that existed above love, founded on affinity and choice.

Yes, her family loved her. Though it seemed sometimes like it was superficially contingent on her behavior, she knew there was an underlying foundation that was unconditional. But she and Richard were strangers who had known each other less than two years. They may be linked together by an engagement, but they were hardly bound by the iron chains of blood or marriage – he could choose to leave at any time. Yet he was still here, holding her and brushing away her remorse with every caress and whispered word.

Love was not a choice, she realized, and it hit her like a car going a hundred miles an hour. If she could choose, she would not love Matthew – she would have made that decision long ago and Lavinia would still be alive. But the kind of unqualified devotion Richard offered _was_ a choice – one which she should prize far above any romantic notion. Whether he loved her or not, he had proposed that they were better than love, somehow above it. "We're more than that," he told her, and at long last she finally understood what he meant. They _were_ more than that.

Richard chose her. She decided to choose him too.

His hand was cupping her face and he wiped a tear off her cheek with his thumb, looking at her with a mixture of affection and concern. She reclaimed her arm from where she had been clinging around his neck and covered his hand with her own, holding it tightly as she turned away to slowly kiss his palm. She kissed the tender hollow in the center, then the heel where his thumb met his wrist; she heard him inhale a ragged breath as she kissed his pulse point before he pulled his hand away.

Mary looked at him questioningly, wondering why he pulled back. She could taste salt on her lips; she could not tell if it was from her earlier tears or the lingering taste of his skin. Not satisfied after he retracted his hand, she arched up to kiss him properly, and he looked slightly defeated as he let her, nevertheless gripping her upper arms to keep her at distance as their lips met. It was vaguely ridiculous to try to keep her away, she thought, as she was pretty much settled on his lap already, so she ran her fingertips lightly over his arm and he softened his grip, allowing her to get a bit closer.

She gasped in surprise as Richard suddenly wrapped an arm around her, pulling her flush against him, and he took advantage of her parted lips, sweeping his tongue into her mouth. Her fingers skimmed through his hair as she returned the kiss with equal fervor.

His free hand found hers and their fingers entwined. Then he broke the kiss as suddenly as she had started it, so she trailed kisses along his jaw as she recovered her breath. "Mary," he began, his words echoing right through her, "you need to go home. Now."

The threadbare restraint in his voice made her feel lightheaded, and she could not help but notice he still held her just as tightly. "I don't want to go home, remember?" she murmured against his throat, not allowing him to dissuade her.

He rested his forehead on her shoulder and said in tones haunted by lust, "This is a terrible idea." It was more a plea than a statement, one she was in no mood to answer at the moment.

Mary reclined back into the pillows, using their linked hands to drawn him to her. She peppered kisses all over his face as he settled over her, his weight pressing down on her delectably. He unhooked his hand from hers to roam, tracing the outline of her figure as he dipped his head to nuzzle at her neck; in response, she dragged her fingers down his back and sighed.

"Don't you want me to be happy?" she said as she kissed the sensitive spot behind his ear. "You said you wanted to be a good husband, and for me to be happy." She realized it was callous to throw his words back at him now, but they were both far beyond fairness at this point.

As his hand skimmed over her breast, her waist, her hip, she wished they could be instantly rid of their clothes – there far too much between them. Then coherent thought deserted her as his mouth found her throat, and she squealed when she felt his teeth nip at the tender skin followed by his tongue to soothe the damage. He captured her lips again as he found the hem of her skirt, urging it up as he caressed her stockinged leg.

"We're not married yet," Richard pointed out, murmuring the words against her mouth. His hand stroked the bare skin above her nylon, and, now free of the restrictive hem of her skirt around her knees, she curled her leg around his. "And you are not yourself."

It was her turn to plead. She broke the kiss to look up at him directly, and the desperation in her voice was not only from desire. "I don't want to be myself."

He gazed down at her with want etched on his strong features, and a new kind of resolve in his eyes.


	9. Loyalty, Part 2

**9. Loyalty, Part 2**

Now they stood together in the same room, months later, clinging to each other once again. Her face buried in the crook of his shoulder and her body utterly consoled by his presence, Mary thought back to Richard's earlier words – 'This is a terrible idea.'

Hastily she pushed him away, and he looked at her exasperated. "You're maddening," he exclaimed, standing up and striding over to the fireplace.

"Me?" She asked, glaring at the back of his head.

"Is there another Mary Crawley here?" he asked the mantel. "My god, two of you would kill me," he muttered.

Not once did they talk about that day. After Richard had doused the fire and shut up the house, they left Haxby in a different kind of silence than in which they had arrived, and Mary could not help but feel it was an ending of some sort. He left Downton that evening, after the wake, in a flurry of excuses to Lady Grantham and the others about a crisis at the newspaper and not a word to her. She watched his car all the way down the drive until it vanished on the horizon, and his departure felt almost as final as Lavinia's.

"I don't think you're wicked," she repeated. "That's what makes it worse."

He returned the next weekend, and the weekend after that. But things had changed. Mary no longer felt assured of his unwavering commitment, and he maintained a distance between them that had not been there before. Things only degenerated from there, to the point that they could have no conversation without it turning into an argument, no look that was not tinged with rancor. She had lost her ally – she missed catching his eye across the dinner table when one of her family said something especially ridiculous, or tormenting him with the latest salacious Downton gossip she knew he would never be able to publish as they drove into town.

"I don't think I could ever forgive you," she stated simply.

They no longer talked about the future; they no longer talked about much of anything. He stopped showing her plans for Haxby, and she stopped accompanying him on visits – today was the first time she had been back since the funeral. Richard became more territorial, which frankly she had not thought possible; and Mary, lonely, gravitated further toward Matthew and dreamt up schemes to hurt him. She became more reluctant than ever to set a wedding date, and he became more infuriated by that fact each week, although with the state of things between them she could not understand why he wanted to go through with it at all.

"Not ever," she added.

He slammed his fist on the brick of the mantle and spun around to face her. "Dammit, Mary, I did the best I could. Now perhaps your beloved Matthew would have been more virtuous -"

"Yes, he would have. And what did you do?"

"In the end – "

"You abandoned me," she cried, her voice breaking. "Just like he would have."

"You are right to blame me. You're right to hate me but -" Richard stopped and looked at her sideways. "What?"

"I thought you go to any lengths for me," she accused. "And when I needed that most, you took it away."

"What?" he repeated again.

"Alright, so you didn't love me…" she began.

"You know I love you."

"Then why did you leave?"

Richard looked at her utterly perplexed. "_What?_"

"We're more than love, remember?" she asked. "I believed that. I believed you! I told you everything, the horrible things I did, and you were supposed to stand by me."

Richard stood very still before her, not moving a muscle.

"Even if you hated me at that moment," she continued, "I never thought you would leave."

He took a breath to say something, but then reconsidered and let it out in a deep exhalation. Mary could see his eyes darting to the side as he considered this information.

"You -" he began, trying to wrap his head around what she had said. "You hate me… _for leaving_?" He said slowly. "I tried to do the honorable thing – the kind of thing you always admired Matthew for – one time in my wretched life and _that _is what you can't forgive me for?" Richard asked, incensed.

"Honorable? You were the one person I could count on beyond honor." The treachery of it was almost too much for her to continue. She had been wrong, so very wrong, about him. About them together. He put on a good show, she thought bitterly, convincing her she could rely on him. But when it came down to it, she could not.

"I took advantage of you in your grief," Richard said emphatically. "It was wrong; you didn't know what you were doing. And yes, it was inexcusable to take things as far as I did. But it took every ounce of my strength to stop myself from indulging in my worst instincts before we did something irrevocable."

As he had gazed down at her with determination in his eyes that afternoon, she never would have guessed it meant he would abruptly disentangle himself from her embrace and, against her protests, take her home.

The betrayal was crushing. She concluded later that what she had just said to him was detestable – "I don't want to be myself" – and perhaps it was this he found so repellant, which is why he put a stop to their rapidly escalating affair and left for London immediately, unable to even look at her. She had wanted to escape everything that had happened, everything she had done, she thought guiltily, when she did not deserve to escape. Lavinia didn't get to. Mary hated herself for what she and Matthew did, so why shouldn't Richard hate her too?

Now Mary was perplexed. It was Richard trying to do the right thing? That was the opposite of his every past action. He'd never had a problem pressing an unfair advantage on her, and she was the same with him. It was _who they were_. He usually welcomed anything that would bind her to him irrevocably – a scandal, an affair. She could not fathom that he would forsake such an opportunity for noble reasons. She didn't want him to!

"All this time you thought I _wanted _to take you back to Downton that day, that I wanted to leave you?" he asked incredulously.

"Please! You ran to London as fast as you could."

"Because if I'd stayed a minute longer, I would have taken you with me."

"Would that have been so awful?" Mary asked in exasperation.

"Yes," Richard replied with certainty. "Tell me you wouldn't have despised me, for starting our life together in such a way." His hands emphasized his words, trying to make her understand. "You were… shaken. It was bad enough that I exploited that fact as much as I did."

He looked so sincere. And she was almost starting to believe him.

"I would have gone with you," she whispered, admitting it to herself for the first time. "When you drove away. I wanted to go with you."

"I know," he said. "And a funeral is no way to start a marriage."

She should not be surprised. After all, they had spent this entire afternoon wandering through their fictional future life, one in which he had placed so many expectations and dreams and one that she had never actually quite believed was real. But Richard believed in it, and he had wanted to establish their life together on better footing than their rocky courtship.

Yet when it came down to it, Mary never really did believe they would have any kind of life together at all, at least not until very recently. She planned for wedding dates, shopped for furniture for Haxby, offered her opinion on renovations, but the whole thing seemed like a lighthouse in the distance, viewed from a boat cast out to sea with no engine and no oars. As she confirmed today, while he could envision their life so clearly, she could not.

No, she was haunted by the past, the what-ifs, the invisible hand that kept pulling her ever backwards, to old houses and fallen people and empty ideas. It had only been after Lavinia's funeral, here in the kitchens of Haxby, where she caught a glimmer of the reality of some kind of hope outside; not a castle in the mist, but an iron bed in front of a sooty fire.

This was shared with a confidant she inexplicably, perhaps ill-advisedly, trusted, the one person she could suddenly imagine as her true equivalent – regardless of class or station or money or power. For what did any of that matter in the dust-filled basement of some forgotten house? All Mary knew at that point was he was the only one at her side, ready for the challenge of sharing her life that she knew no one else could live up to.

That was a reality she could believe in. Which is why it was so hurtful that Richard had dashed her faith, a saboteur indeed. At Haxby that afternoon, she had been ready to discard the hold of a murky past and the mirage of a glittering future in favor of the crystal clear now, yet he had sacrificed their moment together, for that nebulous greater good he always despised. She wanted undying loyalty, but for once, Richard had given her honor. She was angry. But she was also relieved.

Mary considered this with a sigh. She was deeply exhausted, not just from a week of sleeplessness, but from months of heartache. "You've been avoiding me like the plague. What else was I to think?"

"It was too difficult – I couldn't bear to be close to you," he said roughly. "And when I came back… I thought you hated me for pushing you as far as I did."

Of course he would take responsibility. As if it had not been she who instigated things in the first place. Even now, for all his words, he still could not quite believe she wanted him as badly as he wanted her.

"You _should _hate me for pushing you as far as I did," Richard insisted.

She was startled to see self-loathing lurking in his sharp blue eyes; she thought him incapable of such an emotion, however misplaced it happened to be in this situation.

"I hate you for being honorable," Mary said as she approached him, careful to use the present tense. How dare he forsake his selfish principles for her? Just as she concluded honor was no great thing, here her former fiancé was admitting to succumbing to it himself. Reaching up to stroke the side of his face, she told him, "I hate you for deserting me."

He covered her hand with his own as they both looked at each other in bewilderment.

"I wanted to do something decent for you, for once," Richard said softly.

She almost wanted to laugh as her lips quirked up in a shadow of a smile. "Why start now?"


	10. Want

**AN: Rating change alert! If this is not your thing, feel free to skip to the line break in the middle and read **_**after **_**that. **

* * *

**10. Want**

"If you had given me a choice in the matter," Mary said as her arms rounded his shoulders in an embrace, "I certainly wouldn't have chosen decent."

Richard leaned in, his breath hot on her check. "Do you want a choice now?"

There was resolve in his eyes like before, but this time Mary could see he had no trace of honorable intentions. She shook her head as his lips met hers.

Richard kissed her, with all the pent up passion and anger and despair of the last months, and she was quite overwhelmed as she raked her fingers through his hair and kissed him back.

Her back hit the brick of the fireplace and she was stunned by the sudden cold; she leaned in to his warmth to compensate for it, and he deepened the kiss as he held her closer. So many sensations, all at once – Mary felt her hair catch on the rough stone as she tilted her head to welcome the sweep of his tongue into her mouth. She felt his strong hands solidly on her back. She felt the ripple of his shoulder muscles as he clutched her tightly. She felt the press of his entire body against hers, and she needed more.

She tried to pull him away from the fireplace to the improvised sofa placed in front of it, wanting nothing more than to sink into the pillows with him in a cloud of construction dust that covered every surface, but he shook his head. "Not here," he said

"If this is another attempt at propriety…" Mary began cautiously.

"Mere practicality," he replied, taking her hand and leading her through the next room. He pulled her into the first doorway on the left, into one of the servant's rooms, and she watched as he closed the door, turning the key in the latch and tossing it onto the dresser.

"To prevent escape?" She asked with a raised eyebrow.

"To prevent being interrupted by Crawley's search party, should he return," Richard said as he crossed toward her. His arm snaked around her waist and he lifted her hand aloft to kiss her fingers, leaving them standing in the middle of the room as if posed to begin a waltz. Mary felt dizzy like they had been spinning for hours – in a way, they had been circling each other all day, and this was the natural culmination of their dance. She watched intently as his lips grazed over her knuckles, glad for his sturdy arm at her back holding her upright.

He looked up at her suddenly, and her heart skipped a beat at the unconcealed hunger in his eyes.

"You know you could always go home," he told her. Though the comment was facetious, Mary thought she detected a hint of hesitancy too. Her only response was to roll her eyes as she curled her hand around his neck, pulling him down to kiss her once more.

She wasn't sure who was surrendering to whom as Richard pulled her closer. Her other hand was still wound up with his and she found her arm twisted behind her back as he wrapped his arms around her. He did enjoy being the aggressor, she thought as she felt his hand cage her wrist tightly. Not that she minded.

Not that she would let him get away with it totally. She remembered vaguely someone at a dreary Downton dinner party recounting the art of prizefighting - you're only winning if you're gaining ground, the man had told her. She kept this in the back of her mind as she steered Richard backwards towards the narrow servant's bed, intending to gain as much ground as she could.

The roughness of his stubble scratched as she kissed him; she always found the sensation vaguely exotic, taking pleasure in his otherness. Their differences were enthralling to her, both the physical and intellectual; for his part, Richard seemed to revel in her softness, his hand drifting over her curves in an appreciative caress.

He released her wrist and Mary used her newly-liberated hand to undo his tie; he tugged at the collar of her emerald green velvet dress. Because of the wide, draped cut of the neckline, it easily slipped over her shoulder, and after pushing the other side down, he reached to untie the silk sash at her hips. With nothing to keep the loose fabric around her body, it pooled quickly at her feet, the very thing she remembered worrying over as she tried this latest fashion on at the dressmaker's shop.

She shivered, trying to steady her shaky fingers as she tackled the buttons on Richard's shirt and he shrugged out of his jacket. She found herself kissing each bit of skin she revealed by opening every button, as much to be close to his heat as to show her affection. He must have noticed her goosebumps, as his arms encircled her waist again, and she felt warmer instantly.

As her fingers worked his shirt buttons, Richard unclasped the eyelets at the back of her bandeau-style bodice, murmuring something in frustration as his large fingers struggled with the tiny closures. Finally he unhooked the last of the clasps, and the silk fluttered to the floor with her dress. His shirt and undershirt joined the pile, and Mary inhaled sharply at the feeling of his bare skin against hers; she had no room in her lungs to gasp again when he abruptly twisted them around and she found herself on her back with Richard above her.

The cheap wool blanket on the servant's bed scraped at her sensitive skin, so as Richard tracked kisses down her collarbone she grabbed at the cover to pull it from underneath her. The simple task seemed to have used up the very last of her capacity for logical thought, and, that accomplished, she relented her attention to the man currently kissing a path between the valley of her breasts with such delicacy. She grasped his head with both hands as he took a nipple in his mouth, swirling his tongue over the tip as she arched towards him.

Slightly ashamed of the moan she couldn't quite contain, she clasped a hand to her lips. Richard returned to kiss her again, moving her hand out of the way as he murmured, "It's a big house, and we are all alone."

How right he was, Mary thought – alone at last. After sleeping separately under the same roof for many weekends over the last two years, they could both attest to the frustrations of an overcrowded house. How liberating to be free of watchful eyes and perked ears!

She kicked off her shoes and they landed on the tile floor with a thud. Taking the hint, Richard kicked off his as well, bending down to remove his socks and using the opportunity to skim his hand up her leg as he traveled to the top of her stocking. Trying to help, Mary undid the front clasp as his thumb hooked under the edge; a loud rip echoed through the room from where Mary did not have a chance to unhook the second stay. "Anna will ask me how that happened tonight," she protested.

"Who says you're going home tonight?" It was more statement than question. Her other stocking received similar treatment, and Mary surmised the second tear was more to make a point than out of strict necessity.

Divested of her stockings and most of her other clothing, she suddenly felt quite vulnerable as Richard gazed down at her. He seemed to savor the sight of her beneath him as he propped up to look at her; she just wanted to feel his skin against hers again and reached for him. With a wolfish grin he stayed slightly removed above her, unhooking her garter belt and snatching it if off her; he threw it in the direction of their other clothes. As he undid his trousers, she slid off her knickers, hoping it would encourage him to return to her.

Richard covered her body with his own, and she responded to him instinctively, wrapping her leg over his hip as he caught her lips in a demanding kiss. She quivered, with nervousness or need or both, as he entered her slowly, so slowly. She gasped first in pleasure, and then in pain as he came against her barrier and he looked down at her quizzically, his deep voice echoing her name in question as he stroked the back of her thigh. She simply pulled him down for another kiss and he proceeded, seating himself fully within her with a groan as she closed her eyes against the ache.

He stilled, giving her time to adjust; Mary could feel his body taut with the restraint this required. As the pain faded away, she realized how right they felt together, how perfectly they fit, how much they had both needed this. She marveled at how long they had both waited. At that moment, she could not fathom being anywhere but here, Richard buried inside her and she lost within him.

She felt his control give way as he started to move within her. She wrapped her other leg around him, wanting to embrace him fully, to draw them as close together as she could. He gripped her hip as she rose up to meet him, delighting in the feeling of utter abandon.

Richard touched her as if he was memorizing the curves of her body, and Mary ran her hands down his back, for she had no other response to feelings coursing through her veins with each heartbeat. She could feel the rapture building within her as he sped up his thrusts, and she had no idea what she cried out, though his name was chief amongst her utterances. He whispered things to her too, but Mary was so vanished in sensation that she barely heard him, preferring to concentrate on the astonishing feel of his body joined with hers.

And when he reached a hand between their bodies so she was with him as they both crashed over the edge, she gave herself over completely to the pleasure. She gave herself over completely to him, if only for that moment, with no regrets.

* * *

The war had imbued most people with a sense of urgency, the message being that life was short and should be embraced fully. This message had passed Mary by. The war had left her in limbo, paralyzed to take a wrong step in any direction for fear of causing more heartache. The thought of Matthew being gone forever was terrifying, and the reality of Richard retreating from her life as he had after that day at Haxby was worse.

After his departure at Christmas, Mary thought she would find relief from the crushing anxiety that had been building between them, but much to her surprise, the feeling only got worse. She missed him – unpredictable, nefarious Richard, who nevertheless put her before anything else. And she had been missing him from the day of the funeral up until this very moment.

Christmas just made it worse; when he left, it only reminded her what she had lost. Richard had been so… _himself_, when he walked out the front door that morning. She recognized the man that so intrigued her reappear for the first time in months, since their encounter in the kitchens of Haxby. Proud, assured, singular – alone. For he always walked alone.

She had gotten up early to catch him, woken poor Anna at an unholy hour so she would look presentable. Not that Mary had slept a wink the night before, recalling the many things that had passed between them. When she saw him, she had told him she would be fine, regardless. But Richard's whole demeanor had communicated the same thing to her, that he would be alright without her. She did not doubt it – he could pick himself up from anything.

What struck Mary most was the comfortable resignation that had crept back into his eyes, that bittersweet tinge to his expression she always remembered from their early exchanges. It was something in the softening of his smile, a bit of kindness in the crinkles of forehead as he regarded her tenderly. It was a look that came from a lifetime spent on the outside peering in, full of the quiet self-awareness that acknowledged just how far removed from other people he truly was. If there was one thing she could say for Richard, it was that he knew who he was. That look always twisted her heart in knots – she wanted to reach out and bridge the gap, to tell him she felt that way too. She was fairly sure that no else saw that look, if they ever picked up on it or if he ever bestowed it on anyone other than her. But she noticed.

That morning, Richard had almost seemed amused by the whole thing – how he had allowed himself to dream for a moment, how silly his hope had been. He was a _newspaperman_, after all, not at all suited to romance among the aristocracy. Mary wanted to tell him that he was right, he wasn't suited to it. But then, neither was she. She wanted to tell him his aim had not been silly at all, and that when he left to resume his life without her she would feel as lonely as he did.

How odd. She had never minded the feeling of remoteness before. In fact, she rather enjoyed the superiority it provoked within her. But watching her family close ranks when Richard left, she found herself unhappily on the outside. Whether she liked it or not, her loyalty left Downton with him that day, and she knew she would never again cheer for the Crawleys quite as loudly as she would for her newspaperman.

As they lay together in that narrow servant's bed, her head resting on his chest and his arm securely around her, Mary thought about what she wanted. It was a question she had really not considered in such a long time. Like a good aristocrat, she spent her life reacting, operating in certainties instead of desires. When Downton was taken away from her, she scrambled save it. When Matthew was taken away from her, she did the same. 'Want' was not an especially powerful force in her life; at least it was nowhere near as powerful as 'cannot have.'

Richard innovated while her lot preserved, yet Mary herself was not especially right for either. Now, facing the limitless horizon Richard dreamed for them, she found a new channel for her old instincts, the negative to his positive. She had never been very good at 'want,' but she was an expert at its opposite, and it was time to reclaim her title.

She did not want Haxby – that was certain.

She did not want Downton either, not anymore. She did not want a man who refused to fight for her, and she did not want honor. She did not want to waste her life in Yorkshire. And she did not want things to stay as they had been for too long.

She did not want Richard to walk alone, as he had for most of his life. And she did not want to herself, if she was honest.

She did not want their life together to be solely based on his vision, no matter how much that vision centered around her. And she did not want to repeat anything like the last eight months, ever again.

She did not want to be accountable to the past; similarly, she did not want to be held to a future that was not of her own making.

She did not want sacrifice.

And she did not want Richard to leave Haxby without her.


	11. Renewal

**AN: End of the line, folks. **

**A tremendous thanks to everyone who read the story – it was an utter delight to write, and as it stretched on far beyond the length I thought it would, Mary and Richard's relationship only got more fun to explore. **

**Extra appreciation to anyone who took the time to leave reviews; your comments were truly addictive, and you never ceased to illuminate something I never thought of or share a perspective that was entirely new. **

**Finally, a couple of shameless plugs. All the comments in the review section were so interesting that I started a message board in case people want to discuss M/R further. You can find it under Downton Forums. And my next fic, **_**Dispatches in America**_** – my take on Richard's newspaper column from America – is in progress and will be updated every Saturday.**

**Thanks again for reading. **

* * *

**11. Renewal**

"My bed at home is enormous," Richard said as they scavenged for their discarded clothes on the brown tile floor. "Yet still I find myself here, in the servant's quarters of an empty house; a single bed in a dank basement. Perhaps someone is trying to tell me something."

"That your impudence has carried you too far this time?" Mary asked as she tried to hook her torn stockings as best she could.

"That I should get the hell out of Yorkshire," he said, pulling on his jacket.

Mary watched the gathering dark usurp the grey light streaming in through the tiny window – the room was indeed losing its charm in this colorless late afternoon. "I don't think Matthew was joking about the search party," she suggested. "If we're to go to London, we ought to leave soon."

Richard's fingers paused in the middle of fastening his tie. "We?" he repeated.

That damn hope again, Mary thought, so evident in his voice, as if he reached inside his chest for his heart and handed it to her. Richard and his shady, toughened heart; hers to keep.

"If we stay here tonight it will only cause a commotion," she said, as if location were their only roadblock. "I think London is the better part of valor, don't you?"

He looked up at her with an expression she would never forget as long as she lived – a look she could not believe she would have missed if she had never come to Haxby today, a promise of such ardor it took her breath away. Then it disappeared as quickly as it came, vanishing into one of his more amiable smiles. "London it is."

* * *

"Your family will worry," Richard cautioned as they passed through the kitchen and ascended the nearest staircase, the steep concrete and iron steps difficult to navigate with the lack of light.

"They can go one day without me," Mary replied.

"They will have to go a great deal longer than that."

He pushed open the door to the ground floor, and they emerged in the dining room, all marble and mirrors. The pink stone that ran in a herringbone pattern across the floor continued up the walls in fluted columns at regular intervals, while between them, dazzling panels of beveled mirrors reflected the approaching dusk from the windows across.

Mary glanced in one of the mirrors, fixing a pin on a falling curl. Richard came up behind her, his hand brushing over her shoulder as he kissed the back of her neck. "Are we to live in sin?" he asked as she leaned into him.

"What fun," she replied, rather enjoying the idea of shocking all of London by defying the most basic of conventions. How like them, she thought.

"No," he said simply, catching her eye in the mirror.

"You must have a judge or two in your debt," she conceded as he toyed with the velvet neckline of her dress. "And I never cared for church weddings."

He chuckled. "If you can stand my immorality one night longer."

"I expect nothing less," she said, turning to kiss him.

As he tried to deepen the kiss Mary pulled back, her eyes dancing with amusement. Retreating from his grasp, her gaze swept across the polished stone and glass. "Who wants to watch themselves eat?" she asked incredulously at the sight of all the reflective surfaces, appraising the room with distaste.

"Haxby is… unique." Richard said, looking up to the gold latticework that covered the ceiling. "A very particular vision."

She agreed, noting the diamond-pattern glass in the severe gothic windows contrasted with the delicate toile curtains. "Mr. Russell had a rather specific interpretation of the world."

Rather like the man that stood before her. She thought of Matthew, dear Matthew; part of her would always love him, for he had been the screen on which she projected so many misbegotten possibilities, the stand-in for so much of her life that she had not yet been willing to shed. But the truth was that, as deep as her affection for him ran, there were other Matthews in the world. But there was only one Richard Carlisle.

She and Richard had recognized in each other early on the differences that set them apart from the rest – a clarity of vision about their surroundings that others seemed to lack, and the ruthlessness to exploit that weakness. They shared a peculiar morality of uncompromising self-interest. Richard had taught her to embrace this, and she liked to think she had tempered his worst instincts. And she would never doubt his commitment to their shared concerns. It was nice to have a fighter on her side; no longer would she have to wage her battles completely on her own.

He wanted to be a team, partners in some sort of glorious future he imagined for them, and Mary had not fully appreciated what he was offering her. How could she, when he went about it in such an obviously wrong way? Today had shown her that life with Richard was not about being trapped, as she had begun to see it over the past year; today had shown her they could indeed build something together. But it would have to be all their own, because today had shown her that neither was very good at adapting.

Mary had always felt assured of her place in the world, if not in her birthright to Downton then at least in her unquestionable belonging within her surroundings. But Richard had seen in her the jagged corners that that did not fit exactly. And she saw in him a puzzle piece from the wrong box entirely, one that did not seem to go anywhere.

He had tried, in his own clumsy way, to participate in her world. With Haxby, with their new life. And Mary realized she never should have let him, because that endeavor was doomed to failure. They had the means – the power, the money, and, most importantly, the will – to build a new world to suit themselves, just as the Russells did when they built Haxby. So what were they doing trying to reshape the old world? No amount of renovation would erase the legacy of this house, and they could alter and clean and repair for the rest of their lives without making it truly their own. One never owned these houses – one simply _maintained_. And if Mary were interested in maintenance, she would marry Matthew and become Lady Grantham.

Richard created. And when the world seemed so full of possibility, to be relegated to preservation was to be stuck firmly in the past. Yet when she thought about it, Richard's dreams of their future at Haxby were as bad an imitation of Downton as her and Matthew's life would have been. And she did not want her life to be a copy of anything.

Suddenly something occurred to her.

"You always talked about our _new_ life," she began. "But it was always Haxby."

"I thought you needed a change. And perhaps I did too."

"In the form of the house next door?" Mary asked skeptically.

As they walked through manor earlier, she had been trying to imagine their life as an amalgamation of both of their worlds, and she simply could not visualize it. All she saw was a series of mismatched styles and influences, thrown together in the most haphazard of ways. But she realized that anytime they had discussed the future, it was almost entirely centered around her world. They never spoke of London; it was always here.

"Perhaps next time I will think it through more," he said humorously. Then, more seriously, "It seemed like you didn't want to leave it all behind."

"But you did," she persisted. "You were ready to leave London behind, mostly, for a home here." Richard always moved forward while she looked back – she had always envied that quality in him, his disregard for the past, but now she wondered the reason behind it. "Why_ new_? What was wrong with your old life?"

Richard's answer was straightforward: "You were not part of it."

They had both been wrong. Richard had wanted to belong somewhere, and she had never considered that before. Perhaps it had been seeing her own confidence within her surroundings, or maybe it was just giving in to what he thought he was supposed to want, but the day of Lavinia's funeral was not the only time Richard compromised his sense of direction for her benefit; Haxby was proof of the changes he was willing to make in his life for her. And she had mistakenly thought this correct – the loss of Downton had sent her clambering for an alternative, and she allowed Richard to provide it in the form of a country estate. But it was hardly moving on when his new life came in the form of her old life. 'We could never make each other happy,' she had told him. Not like that.

"I am sorry Haxby wasn't right," he said sincerely. It was the only apology she was likely to ring out of him.

"I'm not," Mary replied. "I am only sorry we didn't see it sooner." It was the only apology she was likely to offer.

"Do you think that would have made things easier?"

"Probably not," she allowed with a small smile. "It's difficult to give someone what they want when they don't quite know themselves."

Richard considered this for a moment. "I suppose don't know what I want either," he admitted. "Not exactly. Not now. I want a life with you. Whatever form that takes," he said as twined his hand through hers. "Perhaps we can figure it out together."

He may believe it, but she was not sure this was entirely true – Richard Carlisle always knew what he wanted. It was one of the things she appreciated most about him. But if there was room in his plans for hers, well, she could work with that. They passed through the double doors back into the grand foyer, the sparkling white marble now a quiet shade of grey with the encroaching dusk.

Neither of them was supposed to be here. If everything had gone the way it should, Mary would be Countess of Grantham and Richard would still be in Morningside, Edinburgh; they probably never would have met. The Russells would be at Haxby and the Crawleys at Downton as it had been for centuries; Matthew would be in Manchester and Lavinia would be with him. But things never did go as they are supposed to, and for once, despite the consequences, Mary was so grateful they did not.

"I always felt like an intruder in this house," she said, looking around for what felt like the last time, enjoying the press of Richard's palm against her palm, his fingers curled around her fingers.

"How funny," he replied as he gripped her had a little tighter. "So did I."

She led him across the vast entry, their footsteps echoing for a brief moment then fading away, like so many footsteps that had passed through here. They went through the vestibule and over the threshold; Mary found herself outside and the door shut behind her before she had a chance to glance back.

"And Haxby?" Richard asked, checking the handle to make sure it was locked. The Russells crest remained on the door, carved so deeply into the wood it could never be altered. She was surprised Richard had not replaced the doors entirely, though perhaps he never found the singularity of the Russells' mark on the house quite as oppressive as she did. Or maybe he merely accepted this as the price of joining her society, but she knew this price was too high to pay.

They approached the blue coupe parked unevenly outside and he opened the door for her. Mary paused before climbing in, looking up at the faded house in all its audacity and grandeur.

"Sell it," she replied dispassionately. "It's only a building. Six hours from nowhere."

Richard watched her as she slid over on the bench seat, a faint smile on his lips at the recollection of his words. "And what will we do about a country estate?" he asked, settling next to her behind the wheel. He cranked the engine and pulled out of the motor court in a wide sweep trailed by a cloud of gravel.

"What everyone else does, I presume," she said as she wound her arm around his, "build it." She rested her head against his shoulder, gazing out at the cobalt and turquoise hues of twilight as they drove down the long driveway in the direction of London, many hours ahead.

"My lot builds," Richard teased, "your lot inherits."

"Every dynasty has to start somewhere," she mused. "The Crawleys, the Russells. Ours."

Mary watched as Haxby slowly faded from view in the mirror, absorbed into the ever-darkening night of the Yorkshire winter. She still could not decide if the house was in a state of becoming or having been. And she realized the answer no longer mattered to her.

"Call it a new beginning."

* * *

**The End.**


End file.
